Lucid
by prolixdreams
Summary: This is the story of Dean and Cas - the parts that no one saw, the parts when Dean slept and found a world where things were different, simpler, safer. [Canon compliant destiel, spoilers for basically every episode from 4x01 on.)
1. Lazarus Rising

LAZARUS RISING

The cliffside is an expanse of emerald green, each blade of grass shimmering and perfectly trimmed to a uniform height. Dean does not want to walk toward the edge at first, but then it dawns on him that _Sammy is there._ He wasn't there a moment ago, but he has been there the whole time. He is perched on the edge like an enormous bird, arms (_wings?_) outstretched, head bent forward into the empty space.

Dean wonders who cut the grass, but as soon as his mind approaches the question, it swings a corner. Sammy will surely fall. Dean wonders how they got here, but before he can even finish wondering, the question is gone, like an errant mosquito grabbed in the air, but that vanishes like magic from an opened hand. _Sammy is going to fall and die._

He tries to run, but when his foot falls onto the grass, the earth gives beneath him like a leaky waterbed, pitching his balance as the dew sticks to the hair on his toes and wets the cuff of his jeans. The shockwave ripple spreads out through the ground from where he stepped until it reaches Sammy. The ripple moves beneath Sam and jostles him from his position - Sam has no time to step back, to get his bearings.

He has only enough time to turn his head and, as he slips and falls, to fix Dean with an expression of unadulterated betrayal. _What have you done?_ His face seems to say._ I was fine before you came along and ruined everything._

Dean is standing at the edge of the cliff. Sam is broken and bloodied on the rocks below, the surf teasing at the edges of his hair.

Dean tries to step back, he doesn't remember getting here, but he is still on the edge. No matter how many steps he takes backwards, the cliff-edge follows him relentlessly until he cannot outrun it and he, himself is falling. Slowly. Slowly the pebbles slip from beneath the balls of his feet, slowly he drops through the air, slowly and inexorably he approaches his ruined brother. The one he ruined. He smells surf.

Not surf, but _sulfur_. The smell of sulfur fills Dean's sinuses - it is on him, in him, part of him. Sammy is strapped somehow to the rocks, no, not the rocks, the rack. Dean has broken those bones, Dean has spilled that blood. In the shine of his knife, he sees the reflection of his eyes, as black as if someone had filled his head with coal.

"Dean." The voice is low, like someone dragged it over broken glass. No one is there.

Dean is beneath a clear blue sky. There is a chesterfield sofa in the center of the rolling plain, surrounded by wildflowers, and this makes perfect sense. Sam is beside him on the plaid upholstery, smiling, holding out a beer. Butterflies land on the sofa, and go on their way. Dean takes the beer and sits. Led Zeppelin is playing, and it doesn't especially matter where it is coming from.

He can make out someone standing in the distance - a man, by the looks of it, with dark hair and a tan coat.

"Cheers." Dean shouts, unafraid. He takes a long swig of his beer.

_The motel welcomes him back with the smell of smoke on his pillow and the sound of static on the television. He flips the book out of his lap as the pitch rises higher and higher._


	2. Are You There God, It's Me, Dean Winches

ARE YOU THERE GOD, IT'S ME, DEAN WINCHESTER.

The room is cold, but Dean is comfortable in his t-shirt. He has to get out. Something is coming, and he has to get out. He throws himself against the door again and again, but it doesn't budge, not a millimeter. His heart leaps in fits and starts. He has to get out.

The hole. There is a hole in the wall opposite the door - not as tall as he is, but if he bends, he can fit. He hunches over and steps into the darkness of the hole, anything is better than being stuck in that room. He reaches out in front of him and relief comes on him like a wave when he discovers not just a hiding place, but a _tunnel_. Fantastic. He hustles through it, hand on the ceiling to be sure he doesn't bump his head.

Behind him, he hears the rattle of a door and a set of low, heavy footsteps. Dean quickens his pace, but speed seems impossible to achieve as the ceiling grows lower and lower. Soon, he is on all fours, crawling through the passageway, the footsteps behind him growing closer, never slowing, never quieting.

When the ceiling drops again, he has no choice but to drop to his belly and shimmy along the floor. He cannot turn around in this space, he cannot even look behind him. The eventual dead end leaves his stomach flipping. Something shoves against his feet, and suddenly, his surroundings are familiar.

He is inside a coffin.

There is no escaping this one. He thrashes as much as he can in the tiny space, serving only to reduce how much oxygen he has to breathe. He pants, open mounted, unable to control his racing heart and fluttering belly. He will die in here, and no one will ever find him.

Dean wakes in Bobby's house, relieved that it is dark and silent. Sam is safe. Dean checks. Dean always checks. In the kitchen is, he suddenly knows, the man with the dark hair and the overcoat.

The one they summoned.

The one who saved him.

"Excellent job with the witnesses." He says, voice like sandpaper on stone.

"You were hip to all this?" Dean says, incredulous. He cannot drag his attention away from his necklace. Why is it so heavy? It is like a ten pound weight around his neck.

"I was, uh, made aware." Castiel says.

"Well, thanks a lot for for the angelic assistance. You know I almost got my heart ripped out of my chest." When he touches the front of his shirt, he almost reaches to support the weight of the necklace as it grows heavier still.

"But you didn't." Castiel's face is shadowed.

"I thought angels were supposed to be guardians." Dean points out. In his peripheral vision, the stack of books to his right wavers. "Fluffy wings, halos - You know, Michael Landon. Not dicks."

"Read the bible." Castiel says. "Angels are warriors of god. I'm a soldier."

"Yeah, then why didn't you fight?" Dean asks. The necklace must be fifteen pounds now, or twenty. He imagines his back as a steel rod. He will not bend.

"I'm not here to perch on your shoulder. We had larger concerns."

"Concerns? There are people getting torn to shreds down here. And by the way, while all this is going on, where the hell is your boss, huh, if there is a god?" Dean demands. Behind Castiel, he thinks he sees the kitchen stove flicker on, but when he blinks, it is off again.

"There's a God."

"I'm not convinced." Dean says. How can this asshole be so sure of himself? "'Cause if there's a god, what the hell is he waiting for, huh? Genocide? Monsters roaming the Earth? The freakin' _apocalypse?_ At what point does he lift a damn finger and help the poor bastars that are stuck down here?"

"The Lord works-"

"If you say 'mysterious ways,' so help me I will kick your ass." Inside Dean's head he hears a ringing sound, like the whine after a gunshot in a small room. The bookshelf flickers out of existence, and then is back. Did he just threaten an angel?

The angel in question throws up his hands, and then leaves them back on the edge of the counter. To Castiel's left, Dean tries to read the digital clock perched on the stove in the dim light. It is gibberish, no time at all.

"So, Bobby was right." Dean proclaims, taking a few steps closer. "About the witnesses. This is some kind of a sign of the apocalypse."

"That's why we're here. Big things afoot."

"Do I want to know what kind of things?" The window to Dean's left is full of teeth, but when he glances that way, it is normal.

"I sincerely doubt it, but you need to know." Castiel seems almost apologetic. "The rising of the witnesses is one of the sixty-six seals."

"Okay. I'm guessing that's not a show at seaworld." Dean quips, finding it harder and harder to ignore that the floor is covered in ants. When he finally lets himself look down, even for the tiniest of split seconds, the floor is clean - at least no less clean than usual.

"Those seals are being broken by Lilith." Castiel meets his eyes, and for a moment, the kitchen vanishes completely.

"She did the spell. She rose the witnesses." By the time Dean is finished his sentence, the kitchen is back.

For the rest of their conversation, the room seems stable. Dean is able to pay close attention to the news about Lucifer, and even rests his hands on the counter comfortably. The moment he turns his gaze from Castiel, Castiel is gone.

_Dean gasps awake, soreness spreading in his bones from sleeping on the floor. He pulls himself up with enough struggle that Sam feels the need to ask if he is alright._


	3. In The Beginning

IN THE BEGINNING

Dean laughs, but by the end, he is choking. The air is full of smoke. It does not reduce his humor a bit. He draws back the blade, watching the light from the omnipresent flame glint off its spine. He cannot see his victim's face through the head covering - the man has been brought to him gagged and bagged, as the demons say, though he is otherwise naked. Dean decides not to make introductions just yet.

The constant directionless frustration is with him as always, it coils tight in Dean's shoulders, and he feels the need to release it. He'll draw things out later, now he just needs to let off some steam. He presses the man's hand against the rack to which he is bound, and brings down the knife hard, severing the pinky.

His own hand stings and he drops the knife to the ground. Warm blood drips down his arm, staining red on his skin.

"What have you done?" He growls, but the man only screams inside his gag. Dean wavers when he realizes that his own pinky is on the ground. He is not sure what magic this is, but if the fool before him believes for a moment that Dean can be frightened into surrender, he has another thing coming.

Dean doesn't even wrap his hand - he stares into the stump of his finger, watching the blood push endlessly up and out and over the edge of the flesh, catching glimpses of bone. Anger bubbles up through his chest. Dean doesn't need his pinky finger to slip his knife beneath his victim's next fingernail. He puts some weight behind the palm of his hand, and shoves the knife hard into the soft skin there.

The knife clatters to the floor again, splashing blood droplets against Dean's face and into his open, screaming mouth. He and his victim form a choir of pain as he cradles his right hand.

He has had enough. He will know, now. He rips the bag from the victim's head and his bones turn to ice as he gazes down into his own green, terror-filled eyes, his own freckled and filthy face with his own tear-tracks running down through the dust.

The simmer of anger has risen to a boil and he grips the knife with his hand - the left, this time, and drives down into his mirror's stomach, once, twice, three times, making a cluster of cuts that slice through his own flesh and leave their doubled blood mingling against the drab tiles. He drops the knife and digs his hands into the skin, shredding through his own bound body until he is up to his elbows and yellow fat and plasma are lodged beneath his fingernails.

As he tears his own abdomen apart like so much 'happy birthday' wrapping paper, he feels his own intestines fall out of position and slip warmly down his body.

Dean is weeping, screaming, but he cannot stop. He stretches out to scratch away the skin of his own face, but he cannot reach.

Somehow, something is holding back his arms, two powerful hands wrapped around his wrists. He struggles, but they are too strong.

"Dean." Says the voice behind him like the rumble of a distant engine.

_Dean's eyes fly open. Something is behind him._

_"Hello, Dean." Castiel says, and Dean twists like a startled cat. "What were you... dreaming about?"_

_"You get your freak on by watching other people sleep?" Dean grumbles. It was Castiel's hands around his wrists, he knows now, and the question makes him feel violated. Castiel, as if suddenly aware of this, swallows hard. He doesn't maintain eye contact for long._


	4. Metamorphosis

METAMORPHOSIS

_Dean looks at the bottle of liquor, takes a swig, and then goes back to staring at it. He can't drive back to the motel like this. He pulls the lever at the side of the driver's seat that leans the seat back so far it nearly touches the edge of the seat behind it. The roof of the car spins. Dean doesn't know what he's going to do about what he saw, about Ruby, about Sam, but it's going to have to wait until after he's slept off the worst of this._

Dean is looking in the mirror. He cannot seem to get a bead on his own reflection. When he focuses closely on his nose, he can see it - the curve of the tip, the shape of his nostrils, the freckles scattered across its top. But around his head, shadows are stretching out across the back wall. His eyes are twisting and warping, shifting around his forehead, and his mouth is stretching out and out, around the corners of his jaw.

He focuses on his mouth, and it snaps back into place. The mistake comes when he tries to open it. It starts, but it won't stop, his jaw dropping and dropping until he is like some kind of grinning snake. He cannot feel it, he cannot close it, he is seemingly frozen in position until one of his front teeth drops out.

The other follows it, blood dripping from the hole in his gumline, the tooth landing on his swollen tongue. He reaches inside to pluck the second tooth, and accidentally knocks another. He sucks air through his gaping maw, as one by one, every tooth falls free. Some land back in his mouth, some clatter to the floor like balls on a roulette wheel.

When he tries to breathe, one rolls back into his throat and catches in his windpipe. He tries to cough, but to no avail. He chokes and falls to the carpet in the sparse motel.

"Hello, Dean." Says Castiel's voice, dark and slow. "Be not afraid." He is standing over Dean, lowering himself with grace into a crouch. Two fingers touch Dean's forehead.

They are sitting on the chesterfield sofa among the wildflowers. Dean takes a deep, even breath and runs his tongue over his teeth - all in their normal places.

"I knew it!" He says, leaping off the couch, trampling a few purple blossoms with his bare feet. "I knew it was you, after we summoned you, I knew I had seen you somewhere."

"Yes." A smile almost plays with Cas' lips, but it doesn't quite make it to the surface. "I have been finding you frequently plagued by... unpleasant dreams."

"Wait, are you watching me?" Dean's voice jumps up in pitch. "Like, at night?"

"My understanding is that excessive monitoring would be perceived as rude," Castiel qualifies, and then changes directions. "Imagine it as if you are in a hospital. If your heart were to beat too quickly or too slow, the nurses would be alerted."

"I thought you weren't here to perch on my shoulder." He finds himself pointing a finger at the angel, one which he self-consciously retrieves moments later.

"Just the same." Castiel asserts. "You are no good to us in pieces. Physically or mentally."

"Well..." Dean turns away. He cannot say this while looking at the brilliant blue of Castiel's eyes. "Thanks, Cas."

"You are welcome." Castiel says it quietly, as if the sudden use of the nickname took the wind out of him. All at once, Castiel is just as glad that Dean is facing the other way. He thinks it is past time for the dream to end.

_When Dean rises to consciousness like a swimmer breaking the surface of the water, he glances at Impala's dashboard clock. It hasn't been that long, and yet he finds himself not slightly recovered, but stone cold sober. The incident with Ruby reasserts itself and his limbs feel heavy. Dean turns the key in the ignition and starts back to the motel._

* * *

_Dean hardly hears Travis. Dean has been watching Sam ever since he accidentally blurted yeah when Travis asked if he'd ever been truly hungry. If Sam ever suffered, or if he realized in that moment the number of meals Dean has skipped in his life to make sure that Sam got enough to eat, he gives no sign._

_"I don't know." Sam says. "But we're not gonna kill him, unless he does something to get killed for."_

_Travis' eyes follow Sam from the room before fixing on Dean. "What's up with your brother?"_

_"Don't get me started." Dean answers, and means it. "Hey, uh, I'm gonna get a couple hours of shut-eye before we gotta hit this thing up, yeah?"_

_"Keep an eye on him." Travis warns._

_Something flutters in the pit of Dean's stomach at the idea of sleep, of dreams, but he tries to ignore it. He doesn't even bother to pull up the covers on the dirty motel bed._

Dean swallows hard. Sound floods his mind, a low rolling engine sound. A rolls-royce engine, he knows, but not the kind he likes. The seat is too small. The armrests press into the tops of his hips, and the seat in front of him descends, reclining hard against his knees.

The door to the airplane closes and then melts into the wall.

There is no exit, literally.

He feels the vibration beneath him as the wheels roll. There's no air. He can't get air. He sucks in tiny breaths and moans them out again quick and miserable. His skin prickles and his stomach flips as the plane takes off.

The tears that form and push against his eyes are unacceptable. He looks to the seat next to him, but the woman seated there is looking away. Her head turns in slow motion, and he realizes first that she has no eyes - no face at all. Her head is a blank expanse of skin.

He opens his mouth, but no scream comes out. He turns around to see if anyone else can see her, but every head is empty, featureless flesh. His fingers scrabble at his seatbelt as they ascend into the sky at what feels like a straight up ninety-degree angle... and then they stop ascending.

The lights in the cabin flicker, and then go out. The oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, but no one touches them. No one moves at all, the faceless crowd seemingly perfectly comfortable as the plane tips forward further and further.

"Hello Dean." The voice pours over him like velvet, and suddenly he can breathe again. The rows of chairs are not falling from the sky, no longer in an airplane at all. Light plays on Castiel's face in the otherwise empty movie theater, and Dean turns his head to the left to see a film of a Chesterfield sofa surrounded by purple wildflowers.

"Cas." Dean struggles for a moment until his heartbeat finally settles.

"You are afraid of airplanes."

"Uh. Yeah. I don't... I don't fly." Dean's eyes flit, unbidden, down to Castiel's mouth. Dude needs some chapstick.

"I don't understand." Castiel's eyes narrow. "Is flight not the mode of human transit with the fewest casualties?"

Dean's lips press together in irritation. "You think I don't know that? Jesus."

Castiel winces, but does not address it.

Dean continues, "I would rather fight ten demons bare-handed than get on an airplane. If man were meant to fly your boss would have given us... you know."

Castiel's eyes drift down until he is staring at the darkness of the theater floor. He cannot resolve it - ten demons and no weapon, Dean would surely die. But as he scans every plane in flight above the Earth, not a single one is malfunctioning - every one is as safe as can be.

"You there?" Dean asks.

"He gave you this." Cas looks up abruptly. He reaches one finger out and taps Dean on the side of the head, earning a frown. "To build the planes. Does that comfort you?"

"Yeah, well, apparently he also packed phobias in there." Dean quips. "What's with you and the sofa, anyway?"

"I found it in your mind." Cas says naturally, as if this is obvious.

"A sofa in a field?" Dean's brows dip in confusion.

"A chesterfield, specifically. Yes. I believe you read about it in a book once? The concept seems to have remained with you." The book had been called Life, The Universe, and Everything, making it stand out among the messy library of Dean's mind.

Dean shakes his head. "You gotta get out of my melon, man."

"I'm not..." Understanding comes to Castiel. "Oh. Very well."

If Dean didn't know any better, he would think that Cas looked almost hurt.

Castiel adds: "You can control your own dreams, you know."

"Oh yeah? Am I special? Or..." Dean's eyebrows rise until they seem like they might float right off his face.

"All humans have the potential." Castiel's face is tight.

He has no time to examine the expression, however, as he is suddenly alone in the theater. The lights go on and the film's soothing soundtrack has become strange and tinny.

_Dean opens his eyes and is greeted by the stained wallpaper on the ceiling above. His phone is ringing._


	5. Monster Movie

MONSTER MOVIE

_"Yeah well, we can't save the world. Not today, anyway. But what we can do is chop off some vamps' heads." Dean keeps his eyes mostly on the damp road as he speaks, but he can see Sam's incredulity in his peripheral vision. "Come on, man, it's like the good old days. An honest-to-goodness monster hunt. It's about time the Winchesters got back to tackling a... a straightforward, black-and-white case."_

_They round the bend in the moonlight._

_"How long have you been driving?" Sam asks._

_"Ugh." Dean answers, and Sam understands._

_Dean turns the wheel gently to the right and slows along the shoulder. "So you're down, then?"_

_"Yeah." Sam's voice is resigned, as if he has no choice in whether he is down or not. "But only if we live long enough to get there. Let me drive awhile."_

_Dean hesitates, but he has felt his eyelids drooping for awhile. He nods and hits the brakes all at once, allowing them to switch places. Once he is settled in the passenger seat, he quickly loses the thread of whatever Sam is talking about._

The monster is bearing down on him. The body of a man, skittering unearthly-fast across his mothers' kitchen on eight spider legs. The features of his face slip and dart around its head, and Dean cannot get a bead on any of them. He backs up hard against the wall, shielding his mother from harm.

He closes his eyes, ready to take the blow, but he can see it anyway - as if his eyelids were transparent, he cannot escape the visage of the beast.

_Wait,_ he thinks.

Something is wrong here.

The clock on the stove does not read any time at all - it is an endlessly shifting set of glowing lines. That's different. Dean frowns at the beast. He tries to read the clock again.

Nothing.

The knowledge feels like a cold wind. _This is a dream,_ he thinks._ I'm dreaming._ It isn't real. His heart pounds regardless, but he resists the urge to run, or to fight. He just stands there, watching the creature, which makes less and less sense the more sense he tries to make of it as he stares.

Until it is not there at all.

"Well done." The voice comes from behind him and makes him jump.

"Oh. Cas. Uh, yeah, everything is fine. You don't need to..." Dean trails off. The ghost of a smile on Castiel's face is distracting.

"You have a natural aptitude." Cas says, pride leaking from his words. "You came to awareness and dispatched my creature quickly."

"Well I..." Dean flushes. He is vulnerable to praise, and he knows it. "Wait." His brows drop. "Back up, your creature?"

"It was merely a practice, but you did very well."

"_You_ did that?"

Cas examines the accusing finger pointed in his direction. "I..."

"You gave me a nightmare."

"I would not not have let it progress." Cas defends.

"You made me have a nightmare, just as some kind of test?" Dean demands, stepping into Castiel's personal space. "Don't you think I have enough nightmares on my own? Like I don't need to _rest_? Come on, man, not cool."

The hem of Castiel's trenchcoat catches fire. His eyes are wide, vividly blue in the light of the sudden flames. He waves a hand and, to Dean's great frustration, the fire is immediately extinguished.

"I understand that you are upset." Castiel's voice is firm. "Please understand. Your usual nightmares are of a level and realism far too great for a beginner."

"You're saying I have super-nightmares. Big shock." Dean's sarcasm is like the presence of a spirit the way it chils the room.

"One might say." Castiel affirms. "I only wanted to help."

In the blue beam of Castiel's eyes, Dean's rage flickers and dies like a candle in a stiff breeze.

"Close your eyes." Castiel says.

"Fine." Dean closes them - this time, they act closed, showing him nothing but darkness.

"There is sun shining through your eyelids." Castiel describes, not alarmed by the black nothingness that has overtaken the dream. "You can smell the wildflowers in the field."

Dean is not surprised when he finds these things to be true. "Okay, and?"

"And the sofa is exactly one foot in front of you. The fabric is a blue and brown plaid."

"How familiar." Dean frowns through his closed eyes.

"Open your eyes."

He does. The field surrounds him, and the sofa is there, as promised, complete with tartan fabric and a matching pillow, just as he envisioned.

"Do you see?" Castiel says. "You are talented. You simply need practice."

"What are you talking about, talented?"

_"I didn't do anything."_ Castiel explains. "I only... inspired. If I had created this, the detail would be..." He trails off.

"I did this?" Genuine awe creeps into Dean's tone. When Castiel nods, he looks around. "Damn." A slow grin takes over his mouth.

"In dreams, whatever you believe will be true. Just don't get too excit-"

_Dean's eyelids flutter apart. He is smiling under the early morning light coming through the passenger window._

_"Good dream?" Sam asks._

"Uh, yeah." Dean lets the seat back into an upright position. "Something like that."


	6. Yellow Fever

YELLOW FEVER

_"Sam, I'm not gonna make a left-hand turn into oncoming traffic. I'm not suicidal." Dean spits out all at once. "Did I just say that? That was kind of weird"_

_Dean remembers the practice dreams, remembers to look for something strange - a difficult task in his life, to be sure, but not impossible. Something feels off, and he starts to look for signs of dreaming. He slow the car even further - enough to look at the text of a sign nearby, look away, and then look back to check it again._

_The text is the same._

_"Do you hear something?" Sam seems a bit bewildered, and Dean can't blame him. Sam can almost feel Dean's irrational panic as if it is nudging at the edges of his body. He fishes the EMF meter from his jacket, eyes wide as it wails and clicks._

_"Am I haunted?" Dean can feel his heart thrum against his ribcage. Somewhere inside, he knows it makes no sense, but he asks again, louder this time "Am I haunted?!"_

_It is a great trial for Sam to talk Dean down long enough to get him into the hotel room, and he watches curiously as Dean goes around the room testing every light switch in turn and examining the digital clock readout as if it holds the secrets to the universe._

_Dean knows how odd he must look, but the last thing he wants to do is open the can of worms about his dreams. He doesn't even remove his shoed before he lays down on the bed, reviewing his information. He is awake. Of this he is sure now, at least. It is a jolt when Sam turns out the lights, but he is content to watch the dark wall to one side of him and try to think calming thoughts._

It comes as no small surprise when the room starts to rumble. Dean jumps from the bed and pushes the curtains away from the fourth-story window. It is the tallest building in the small neighborhood and provides a perfect vantage point to watch a flaming rock the size of their hotel room pierce the cloud layer and come crashing to earth.

The shockwave starts mere blocks away, why does it take so long to reach them? Dean turns from the window and tries to run, but his feet feel like they're trapped in maple syrup. He pushes forward inch by inch until he's nearly at Sam's bed.

"Sam! Sammy! Come on, we gotta go!"

There is no answer.

"Sammy!"

Just one more step, come on, he has to touch Sam, has to shake him awake and get him out of here, they have to run, they have to run away, the explosion is coming.

And then it comes.

It starts with the window - it shatters inward, raining tiny fragments of glass down on Dean's head and neck. He twists around to see the window frame crash apart into splinters, the wall ripping like thin tissue under the pressure of the shockwave.

The desk along the wall flies away into the space where the roof had been, the  
computer exploding away like it was shot from a cannon. And then it comes for Dean.

His feet are lifted from the dark carpet and he reaches out to Sam, who is still in the bed that is being thrown into the air. As they ride the disaster outward, Dean catches sight of the bedside clock.

It is just a bunch of shifting lines.

Dreaming?

Suddenly it makes sense. Why would the bedside clock work after it had been ripped from the wall, anyway? Dean closes his eyes and imagines the field and the sofa.

Nothing. He opens them, only to find himself careening toward the ground.

"CAS!" He shouts, panic renewed. "CAS IT ISN'T WORKING!" Had he been wrong, Is he awake? "HELP CAS PLEASE HELP" He hollers into the wind as he shuts his eyes tight and braces  
for the impact.

It never comes.

"What's the matter?" Castiel is out of breath. Frowning.

The room is back, just as it was before the comet - same nonsense clock. He is sitting on the edge of the bed, aware of Sam's peaceful breaths in his peripheral vision.

"What..." Dean catches his breath. His voice is high and filled with childlike fright. "What happened? What happened? I did it like you said. I imagined the..." He swallows against his dry throat. "The thing." He wants a better look at Cas, and as if by magic, a light from nowhere brings the room into sharper relief.

"I'm not sure. I do not believe you made any mistake. It was difficult for me to penetrate the layers of your mind. Something is different."

"Me?" Dean nearly squeaks.

"Try to be calm."

"But..." He gestures wildly at the window.

The room starts to rumble again.

"Nonononononono..." Dean whimpers.

He feels the bed sink next to him. When he opens his squinted eyes, Cas has alighted beside him at a proximity usually reserved for Sam, or maybe a girlfriend. Cas' eyes catch his, and seem to lock them - Dean feels as if he cannot look away from the gaze. His heart slows, but not enough. His face is still taut, his chest rising and falling at alarming speed as he hyperventilates.

Castiel can feel the real danger - not the comet, but the fear. The fear is not only in Dean's mind, in his dream, but it is reaching out and out to Dean's physical body, burning up his lungs, his heart. Something truly is amiss, but he knows better than to say so, lest he alarm Dean further.

Instead, he takes a risk.

Dean breaks the eye contact when he feels the warm touch on his hand - Cas is gathering Dean's hands into his own.

His breathing slows.

"You are safe." He lies.

"I..." Dean hesitates. His first instinct is to pull his hands away. He doesn't exactly go around holding hands with dudes. But something overrides it, stops him. He feels the fear falling down through his body, sinking through his legs and past his knees and dripping away through the soles of his feet.

Maybe it isn't so bad to let Cas hold his hands a little longer.

"Can you wake up?" Cas asks quietly.

Dean screws up his face as he tries. He knows he probably looks like a toddler with gas, but it is worth it if he can escape. When it fails, he shakes his head, alarm building deep inside him once more.

"It's alright." Cas reassures, his words seeming almost to come visible from his mouth and settle along Dean's skin. He surprises himself at how well he lies, how well he conceals the unsettled burn that ripples inside him when he realizes that he can't wake Dean either. He feels the presence of something strange and old.

"It doesn't uh..." Dean laughs darkly. "It doesn't seem alright."

"It's alright." Cas repeats simply. "I'll stay here."

And there they both stay, silent and nearly unmoving, until the morning comes.

_The darkness turns to light abruptly and Dean is lying down in he bed where he - he is awake now. Sam is gone, but he doesn't have time to panic before he finds the note: 'Getting donuts. Be back soon.' But Dean no longer feels comfortable up here. Something about the fourth floor feels wrong, as if it could all collapse at any moment._

_Unable to shake the feeling, he retreats to the safety of the car and turns up the radio to drown out the fear._


	7. It's The Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester

IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, SAM WINCHESTER

_"Look," Sam's forehead crinkles. "It just starts with ghosts and ghouls. This sucker keeps on going. By night's end, we are talking every awful thing we've ever seen. Everything we fight, all in one place."_

_"It's gonna be a slaughterhouse." _

_Sam nods, seeing the lines between Dean's brows, thinking he looks exhausted."We'd both better get some shuteye, don't you think?"_

_Dean allows himself the luxury of a sigh._

_"And take your shoes off, this time." Sam says._

_"Yes, mother." Dean toes off his shoes at the foot of the bed as Sam draws the curtain. He hides his excitement - the last few times he'd slammed the lid of his laptop when Sam had walked in the room, it hadn't been Busty Asian Beauties he was concealing. He has been doing research. Not about a haunting or a demon, but about what Cas had told him, about lucid dreaming - how to become aware, how to take control._

_He closes his eyes, absently wondering where this information has been all his nightmare-filled life, why no one had told him that he didn't have to suffer until now. He sets his intention. Tonight, he will fly._

The tie is choking him. Dean tries to swallow, but his adams apple feels stuck in place and his throat is gummy and dry. Why is it so hot in here? He looks around the boardroom, the table filled with snappy-dressed businesspeople whose faces he can't quite make out, but nothing seems amiss.

"Well, Mr. Winchester?" Says the droning voice of the CEO, a sharp-browed older woman with an uncanny resemblance to Dean's all-time least favorite vice-principal. "Please begin your presentation."

"I... Uh..." Dean stammers. His breath comes quick. He cannot recall the subject. If he could just remember what he is supposed to speak about, he's sure he could bullshit his way through it, but every time he thinks he's almost found the memory, it slips away like a slimy fish.

"Mr. Winchester. I am beginning to believe you don't take your position with this company very seriously."

Clamminess slips up Dean's face. He feels the flush of his cheeks and isn't sure whether it is more dignified to wipe the sweat from his forehead or to attempt to ignore it. "I just... I don't..." He starts to hyperventilate.

"Turn out the lights."

Dean looks down to see the gentle face of the co-worker seated beside him, hair mussed and chin dotted with stubble. All at once he knows the man - Why wouldn't he recognize Mr. Novak? They've worked together for years.

"You have to turn out the lights." Novak says again.

Dean swallows. "Uh. Okay. I..." He trails off as he steps gingerly to the far wall, where the cream-colored lightswitch that has always been there suddenly appears. He flips it from ON to OFF.

The flourescent bulbs that light the rooom resolutely continue to glow. Something stirs within Dean. He looks back to the chair next to his, but Novak is gone.

"Mister Winchester." His boss says again, coughing pointedly.

Dean flips the switch again, and again, to no result at all.

"Mister Winchester, need I tell you what will happen if this kind of behabis neevoo conmri hinuus trivunopa?"

The people in the boardroom are grayscale mannequins dressed in identical suits.

_Not real. It isn't real._ He looks back at the now-empty chair, consumed by the feeling that it is somehow important. He reaches through the mental fog, groping about for the truth, something about that chair... but it eludes him.

He looks back to the CEO. She is a blonde blow-up doll, mouth agape, seams crinkled at the sides of her head where the sheets of latex meet.

What was he going to do? He is transfixed by his own fingers on the light-switch.

His intention.

It isn't real, he tells himself. Tonight, he will fly. He starts to feel his heart rattle and the room begins to blur. No. Not yet. Don't get too like a crazy person, he closes his eyes and spins in circles - a trick he read about to hold onto a dream. It seems to work well enough, the room's edges sharpen again and he feels steady.

When he opens his eyes, he is standing on the window sill, and the pane is gone. The wind whips his hair and steals his breath away. He knows without checking that the boardroom is on the sixty-third floor, something that is only true because he knows it. A long stretch of highway leads away from the foot of the building. No one stands on the road below.

Here goes nothing.

He jumps.

It is only after he jumps that he asks himself, _how?_ He is falling, dropping like a stone through the air head first, asphalt approaching alarmingly fast._ Fly fly fly fly come on fly just fly._ Just before he collides with the pavement, he slips forward, zooming like he is on wheels inches from the road. He isn't sure why he kicks his legs, but he does, and a slight change of angle sends him careening up into the sky like a hawk coming out of a dive.

Near the apex of the flight, when most of the energy from the fall is spent, he kicks his legs again, pushing down with his arms the way he would if he was trying to swim. He keeps his eyes fixed upward on the clouds. His progress is not as easy as he had hoped, but he is determined to break through them.

The clouds (_cumulus,_ he thinks, in an unbidden memory of third grade science) are like a roof above him at first, but with one last push, he is up and up and above them.

The sky of his dreams is dark and star-filled. Here, hovering is effortless, if only because that is what he expects. The clouds blow fast beneath him like a conveyer belt of white fluff.

"Hello, Dean."

Sounds like the guy from the board room, Nov-_Oh._ Dean turns to see Cas. Suddenly he is deeply self-conscious regarding flight.

"Cas? You really here?" His eyes roam across the hills and valleys of Cas' face, and if he is not mistaken, he can find a hint of pride, like a teacher looking at a star pupil.

"Will you allow me to stay?" Dean's thoughts and feelings are like a mist in the air, and Cas endeavors not to interpret them, for the sake of courtesy.

Guilt eddies around Dean. He changes the subject: "You, uh..." he gestures dumbly to the area just over Cas' shoulder, where he can see enormous wings spreading outward from behind him, black as coal, the tips reflecting the starlight. "Did I do that, or did you?"

Castiel looks to his left, and then to his right. "You did."

"You don't usually have those?" Dean is a little breathless.

"Wings?" Castiel's eyes fall to the cloud floor below them. "In a manner of speaking, they are always present. Wings... are like dreams. You will see what you expect to see."

Dean remembers to inhale. Something about the wings is distracting, and he is having trouble maintaining altitude, little kicks keeping him up. He is more than a little annoyed that Castiel, who is having no such problem, either isn't noticing or doesn't care. Later, he will recall that the moment Castiel catches his gaze is the moment he stops struggling, and he will wonder if the two are related.

"We need to talk." Castiel says. The peace he had felt upon entering the dream melts from his face and tension takes its place. "Something is coming to this town - something dangerous."

"Yeah," Dean says, "Sam's one step ahead of you, he told me all about the Samhain thing."

"We will meet again soon, Dean. Things are..." He sighs softly. "Whatever I, or any other angel, says to you, do not forget yourself. Remember that which you value. I have to urge caution-About Sam, about everything. I do not wish you to be led astray."

"I don't understand." He wants to search Cas' face for understanding but Cas is gone. One by one, the stars go out.

_Candy. When Dean wakes, his first thought is of candy. If he's going to have to spend half his Halloween sitting in the car outside razor-wife's house, he's calling dibs on that bag of candy._


	8. Interlude

Interlude

_"Sammmoooo."_

_"Wow." Sam scoffs. "Did you get drunk or did you get roofied? Jesus."_

_"Fuck." Dean says, apropos of nothing. "Is it Nofemder third yet?" He slurs._

_All the humor falls out of Sam's face. "Forty minutes, man. Not much longer."_

_Dean nods lazily. He feels something heavy on his chest and realizes belatedly that Sam is tucking him into bed - he allows it, but keeps his grip on the bottle of cheap scotch clutched in his left fist. He tries to muster a frown in what he thinks is probably Sam's general direction for trying to take it. The wall_ looks strange.

"Shit." Dean says to himself, sitting up in bed and throwing his feet down onto the sand. "CAS. HEY. CAS. C'mon dude I know you can hear me." He shouts to nothing. "Why didn't you tell me how much easier this is when I'm drunk?"

"What did you think?" Cas' face, suddenly present, is a portrait of irritation. "That I would advise you to consume _more_ alcohol?"

"Whoa." Dean's mouth drops into a drunken smile. "Haha dude, look at you, being all emotional and shit."

"Did you believe that I was devoid of feelings?" The muscles in his jaw twitch. He looks like a man interrupted mid-dinner by an especially persistent telemarketer. "Because I assure you that I am perfectly capable of both annoyance and disappointment."

"Hey, man." Dean starts to tip backwards and tries to play it off like he _meant _all along to sit down on the sand really hard. "Don't be a dick."

"Drinking will not improve your skills." Castiel points out.

"Fuck you, you know that?" Dean drops his head between his knees, examining individual grains. "Do you even know what today is?"

"I don't see... It's November Sec-" He stops, having just discreetly plucked the thought out of the sea air. Cas' voice drops to a mutter as he shuffles in his shoes through the sand toward Dean. He picks up the last bit, "...Inventing an arbitrary calendar and then using it as an excuse to poison yourselves..."

Cas reaches down, but Dean sees where he's going with this instantly and crabwalks backwards. "Uh-uh." Dean negates. "No way man. You're not taking this from me."

"Dean, just let me..." He takes another step, but when Dean imagines the sand shifting beneath his feet, Cas isn't quick enough to catch himself before he tumbles forward to his hands and knees on the beach. Anger flashes through him, real anger, and everything in him wants to scold Dean, to frighten him, to remind him who he is talking to.

But he doesn't.

"Yo. You touch me, my blood alcohol content drops to zero, I feel stuff." Dean explains, seemingly oblivious. "If I wanted to feel stuff I wouldn't have drunk all that shit in the first place."

"I would like to remind you that I am not some kind of repository for your complaints, and, nor am I obliged to come running every time you want an audience for a drunken fit." Cas' voice is steady as he stands and dusts the sand from his slacks, taking a moment to collect himself.

Dean smells something in the air, like ozone, and he knows what it means. "No no no don't go don't go." He leans forward from his position on the ground and grabs Cas' hand, tugging on it but not trying to stand. Warm. "You can... sober me or whatever."

Despite the fact that Cas has no need to breathe at all, he huffs out a sigh. He thinks of something his brother once told him, an echo of their father, some memory of a memory, a dark and distant clutch at something inside him, a reminder: _The moment when they are the least deserving of our love is the moment when they need it most._

In one fluid motion, Cas deposits himself cross-legged on the sand. Tentatively, he reaches out to Dean's forehead and watches him wince as his hand makes contact.

Dean drops his head low and at first, Cas thinks he is coughing, but then he sees it - the tear that wets the shore beneath it.

Dean is crying. "Sammy doesn't-" His breath hitches. "He was too young. He doesn't remember things. He doesn't know, you know, that moment when you realize you're never gonna see them again. Never gonna hear her humming along with the radio when she's mashing potatoes, never gonna come home on your bike and see her in the garden wearing those stupid flower pants and straw hat, never gonna have somebody to... to talk to again. Somebody who'll just listen."

Cas has to search the whirl of thoughts and memories to realize that somebody who'll listen is a contrast to his father - associations of fear and judgment stick firmly to thoughts of him.

"I'm sorry." Dean takes a deep breath._ Get a hold of yourself,_ he thinks. _The things this dude has probably seen, why would he give a shit about some guy's dead mom?_ He swallows the lump in his throat. "You're right. I shouldn't be complaining to you. I don't know what the hell you guys think I'm gonna be good for." _I'm a fucking idiot._

The tide has come in, and the ocean has nearly reached the place where they're sitting.

"I am not trying to be intrusive." Cas says, "But some of your thoughts are very loud."

"Oh yeah?" The idea earns a little laugh from Dean. He almost doesn't care - how much worse could it get than what he'd said aloud?

"You are not an idiot."

"Now I wish I still was drunk." Dean says, trying to shake off the touchy-feelies. "At least I'd have an excuse."

"What do you need to excuse?" Cas has difficulty parsing this.

Dean isn't sure if Cas is being polite, or if his years of practice at keeping his poker face have paid off. He looks up to find Cas searching his face. Dean isn't sure when he started searching back, but at some point the ocean of his dream has changed colors - no longer tinged with tropical green, but a rich crystal blue, sort of like... _stop._

"You don't need to stay here." Dean mutters, looking out at the waves.

"No, I don't." Cas shifts his weight to sit next to Dean and watch the tide with him, so unapologetically close that their legs nearly touch.

Dean almost tells him to back off. Almost tells him it's not normal, that two dudes don't sit like this. Almost, but not quite - the warmth at his side is an unexpected comfort that holds his broken parts together far better than the tenuous glue of cheap scotch.

"To be honest," Dean says, "I feel like I'm off the edge of the map here."

"I am not sure if this will make you feel any better," Cas qualifies, "but you aren't alone."

_"Hey drunky." Sam is nudging his shoulder - he is showered and dressed and packed already. "Wake up. We gotta check out."_

_"I'm up, I'm up." Dean groans._

_"How bad is it?" Sam ventures. He had slept uneasily himself and woke several times in the night to make sure Dean was breathing._

_In fact, Dean is not hungover, not even sore. He would even go so far as to say he feels better than on an average morning. He's pretty sure he doesn't want to have this conversation with Sam right now though, with regards to why, so he just grunts noncommitally as he gathers his things._

_In the coming weeks when Castiel does not visit Dean's dreams, he will try not to be disappointed. He will try not to give in to prayer, but he will fail, and when he receives no answer still, he will remind himself that this is how it has always been, that it shouldn't hurt any more than it always has._

_Shoulds and shouldn'ts will offer him little comfort, however, and by the time he and Sam venture to Concrete, Washington, he will be drinking every night before he sleeps, in hopes that Castiel will show up at least to lecture him._

_It will make Castiel feel no better, to distance himself, but he recognizes the danger in what had crept into the little space between them on the beach, and the tired ache that grows like a seed inside him when he hears his name and cannot answer will only confirm to him that he is making the right decision. There is too much at stake to take risks._


	9. Heaven and Hell

**HEAVEN AND HELL**

Dean shuts the door behind him.

"Look at that." Uriel says. "It's so cute when monkeys wear clothes."

The ground beneath his feet doesn't feel quite right. The scant light from the window is brighter than it should be. Something in his heart goes _click, click, click_ like the tumblers inside a lock.

An old barnwood sign to his right reads "CARROTS FOR SALE." He glances away, and looks back - force of habit - but he has to suppress his startled reaction when it doesn't say anything now, the white paint-lines wobbling out of place into meaninglessness.

_click._

"I'm dreaming, aren't I?" Dean almost regrets saying it out loud, feeling all at once as though he's shown his hand.

"It's the only way we could chat." Uriel says, the smugness on his face dimming as his eyebrows dart up -_ You catch on faster than I expected_, his face seems to say. "Since you're hiding like cowards."

"Don't normally see you off leash. Where's your boss?" Dean tries to fake cool, not even saying the name, but all he's thinking is _Cas Cas Cas,_ the nickname a mantra in Dean's head, a drumbeat of anxiety, _where is Cas? _He wonders if Uriel is hearing it.

"Castiel?" Uriel _corrects him._ Shit. "Oh, he, uh... He's not here."

Dean feels like there is a fist around his stomach, squeezing and twisting.

"See, he has this weakness." Uriel continues conspiratorially. "He_ likes_ you." Uriel

Dean's teeth clench. Likes him? He might have thought so, but no. He flashes through every time he has been ignored, every time he's twisted dreams to his whims and turned to show Cas and felt the holes punched into his victory when he's found himself alone, every disappointed morning. _Could have fooled me!_ He thinks as loud as he can, as if Cas will somehow hear or feel his spite.

"Time's up, boy. We want the girl." Uriel says, hiding his own desperation to keep this thing on-message.

"Wouldn't do that if I were you. See, she got her grace back. Full blown angel now." Dean bluffs hard, pulling the air around him tight, keeping his secrets to himself as best as he can.

"That'd be a neat trick, considering," Uriel doesn't need to reach into Dean's mind to know he's lying. He fishes the vial from under the collar of his shirt. "I have her grace right here. We can't let hell get their hooks into her."

"Well then why don't you just give her back her angel juice?" Dean protests, unable to tear his eyes from the vial, mesmerized by the sheer presence that tiny thing has in the room. It is smaller than his little finger but it _feels_ bigger than the entire barn.

"She committed a serious crime." Uriel explains, and then suddenly wonders whe he's even bothering to explain himself.

Uriel wishes Castiel would have just come himself, like he doesn't know he's the only one this bonehead listens to, but he'd seen the way Castiel's face had frozen when it was time, when he saw where Dean had been, who he had been with. He'd known Castiel would order him to do it before the words even came out, and no matter how hard Uriel had wanted to roll his eyes, well... orders are orders.

"What?" Anger bubbles through Dean as he points a finger at his own head. "Thinking for herself?"

"This is our business, not yours. She's not even human, not technically." Uriel says - what he realizes now he should have said in the first place. Besides, he thinks, if Castiel is going to get all weird about it, maybe it's best that he's staying away from Dean Winchester for awhile anyway.

"Yeah, well, I guess I just like being a pain the pooper." Dean snaps.

Uriel smirks. He is about finished beating around bushes - he's had quite enough of this, and if he's going to have to run this errand, he's not going to hold back in letting Dean know _exactly why_ he gets Uriel and not his little pal.

"No, there's more." Uriel says, stepping toward Dean, putting a little magic show as if he'd only just figured it out. He laughs and circles his prey. "You cut yourself a slice of... angel food cake. Didn't you? Huh? You did."

Dean's stomach feels like ice as he tries to assemble the puzzle. "What do you care?" He asks, requesting the missing piece too directly, so he has to add a zing, "You're junkless down there, right? Like a Ken doll?"

"Ooh." Uriel snickers, though in truth, he is almost relieved - Dean's little burn tells Uriel things can't have gotten too bad. "Well, it's your last chance. Give us the girl, or-"

"Or what?" Dean interrupts. "What, you're gonna toss me back in the hole? You're bluffing." Insults had failed, Dean resorts to graspoing at whatever he can for power in this flailing conversation.

"Try me." Uriel shoots back, though his irritation is bleeding through, and he knows it. He certainly knows better than to break Castiel's toy. He's fairly sure an appeal will go unheard, but he attempts it anyway. "This is a whole lot bigger than the plans we've got for you, Dean. You can be replaced."

Dean, much to Uriel's great chagrin, considers it. After the stony moment of feeling like a puppy being returned to the pound, he collects himself. He knows better. He is resigned, he deserves it, that is what he believes. This was nice while it lasted.

"What the hell?" Dean says, low and numb. "Go ahead and do it."

Uriel's not so sure. He approaches, as if taking Dean up on his offer, only to find Dean _genuinely _steeling himself. Shit. "You're just crazy enough to go, aren't you?"

"What can I say? I don't break easy." Dean says without making eye contact.

_Is he serious?_ "Oh yes, you do." Uriel insists. His patience has wholly expired. "You just got to know where to apply the right pressure."

_When Dean wakes, he feels as if something heavy and cold is weighing his body to the ground. He needs a drink._


	10. Family Remains

**FAMILY REMAINS**

_"Stratton, Nebraska." Dean reports, changing the subject. "A man gets hacked to death in a locked room inside a locked house. No signs of forced entry."_

_Sam winces, but admits, "Sounds like a ghost."_

_"Yes it does."_

_"Dean. For me. Like, two hours, before we start driving, just sleep a little. I don't want to die because you pass out at the wheel."_

_But Dean doesn't want to sleep. He's sick of sleep. Sick of dreaming. Sick of disappointment. He doesn't look at Sam at first, until he does, and that's where he makes his mistake. The sigh escapes him before he can stop it and unhappy as he is about it, he hears himself agree. Two hours. Once he's nestled his head against the window, sleep comes for him before he's even ready for it._

The breeze whistles up the mountain, nudging the little boat gently back and forth on the lake like it's rocking a cradle. Dean breathes in the lake-smell, mingled with wafts of humidity and green things. Wisps of cloud and sky shift colors, leaving the clouds pale blue against a white backdrop. The cloud-color deepens, turns rich and crystalline to match the clear lake that buoys him, a symmetry that soothes aching nerves and raises no alarms at all.

He doesn't think to check for a dream sign until he hears it.

"Dean."

He scrabbles upright in the little rowboat, startled, and suddenly the lake is drained and they are sitting on dry land in the dimness of the lakebed.

"Cas." He takes in Castiel slowly, observes his posture - the tension in his shoulders, the lines between his brows, the shadows in his eyes. Dean is careful to keep his own face neutral. He nearly wakes himself deliberately to escape any hint of a conversation.

Cas looks around at the sloping dirt walls of the former lake. "Did I interrupt something?"

"Nothing deliberate." Dean says icily.

"I see." Guilt chills through Cas as he realizes that he had almost _hoped_ for a nightmare, something he could fix to earn back a little good will.

_Do you?_ Dean thinks, saying, "Well? Get to the point. If you're here, that means something's... some seal is being broken, or Sammy's doing something stupid or you're going to drag me into some holy misadventure, right?"

"No." Cas looks down as though the wood panels of the boat are fascinating. "There's no-I came to say thank you."

"For what? I haven't exactly been the most obedient little pawn." Dean stands up on the bench and cranes his neck to see how high the lake goes.

"Precisely." Cas says, shifting his gaze up at Dean's profile silhouetted against the sky. "Among other things, Alistair was very close to separating me from my vessel. A kind of death, I suppose. Finding another would have been challenging, at least for a few decades."

Dean closes his eyes and tries to hold up the walls.

"Dean," Cas says, "You saved me."

"Yeah, well." He won't look. He won't look.

"You didn't need to do that. Uriel certainly didn't seem to find intervention necessary." A little bitterness trembles through his words.

Dean feels the_ snap _inside. "So you just showed up to say thanks, that's it? Nothing else?" He doesn't like the way he sounds.

"I don't understand."

"Yeah, OK then, you're welcome, seeya." Dean jumps off the edge of the boat, giving a little push at the height of the jump, but nothing happens, he can't latch onto the air, and falls as he usually would in waking life. His shoes squelch on the mud.

Cas steps out of the boat and faces him, stepping deep into what Dean would consider his 'bubble.'

"Did you do that?" Dean points at the ground, wanting to blame Castiel for his failure to achieve liftoff. "I mean, you give me nightmares, you act like we're, I don't know, friends or something, and then you poof out and don't answer me and screw me over the next chance you get, so I wouldn't put it past you."

"I-No." Cas looks around at the dirt as if it holds the secrets to understanding Dean, like the stones and roots would spell out what he should say. "I felt it would not be the right action, to spend too much time on... frivolous things."

Dean's tongue darts across his lips. "Frivolous?" He tastes the word as if it's in an alien language. Wasn't he just doing his job? Water starts to seep into the ground.

The corner of Cas' mouth twitches up just the tiniest bit. "I had no orders to alter your dreams."

Castiel's gaze is like a wavering flame, like an arc of lightning, like the vial in the barn, Dean can't seem to look away. Dean thinks Cas' breathing is awfully strained for someone who doesn't need air. The water in the lake bed rises to their ankles. It doesn't seem to have any particular temperature.

"Things are changing, Dean." Cas looks at Dean's hands, then back up. He remembers Dean from the barn, specifically Dean with Anna. Dean's hands on her, the way her face had looked when he'd kissed her, like it gave her the kind of strength that Cas wishes he had right now. "Maybe everything."

"Changing?"

"I remembered what you said." He remembers the moment that Alistair's hands fell from his throat, the moment he realized Dean had saved him. "About someone to talk to. Coming to your dream, perhaps it was a selfish impulse. You saved me once." The unspoken,_ I need saving, again._

Dean frowns, the words between the lines almost screamed louder than the words he heard, and he has to ask - "Did something happen?"

The water reaches their waists, so much closer than Dean would ever let anyone else stand.

When Cas reaches for Dean's submerged hand, he doesn't know why he doesn't pull away, but he doesn't. He just lets it happen, lets Cas' fingers wrap around his. He looks at his own hand as though it belongs to someone else.

Castiel says, "Not what happened. What's going to happen."

"What do you mean, 'what's going to happen?'" Dean's lower lip curls into his mouth in a gesture of concentration.

Cas' head shakes. He pulls away from the edges of his vessel, its impulses feeling like dangerous territory. "You should not expect to see me here." He cautions, referring to Dean's apparent feelings of abandonment.

"So that's it... you just..." Dean feels the water lap at his chin.

Cas looks around as if he thinks he may be watched. He is afraid of the reason he came here, of the idea that when he felt alone, when he needed comfort, he came to Dean Winchester. The water is nearly above his mouth now.

"I'm not sure where my orders are really coming from." Cas' voice is so quiet that Dean nearly doesn't hear him. "I don't know what is right to obey."

Dean's heart seems to strain, to stop. He breathes comfortably under the water as it rises beyond his nose and eyes, but his heart hurts regardless. Cas looks so lost, so frightened, so unlike the fearsome thing he is, and no matter how he tries, Dean is helpless to ignore it. He cannot allow himself to be so obviously needed to and do nothing.

To see Cas torn inspires a new kind of fear. If an_ angel of the lord_ is in the weeds, what chance does_ he_ have?

When words fail, Dean's body acts, unbidden. His arms move slow through the water, but it feels good, to be buried underwater where there is no threat of talking. He grabs Cas by the shoulders and pulls him close. Cas' hands alight on his sides, and he doesn't resist, instead, he leans into it. Maybe he needed it just as much.

_Dean's consciousness comes back easy and gentle, and Sam notices the mood shift instantly._

_"I told you so." Sam says._

_"Told me what?"_

_"That you needed a few winks." Sam climbs back into the passenger seat._

_"Shut up." Dean says as he starts the car._


	11. It's A Terrible Life

**IT'S A TERRIBLE LIFE**

_"I'm Dean Smith, okay?" Dean isn't sure whether he's reminding Sam or himself. "Director of Sales and Marketing. I went to Stanford. My father's name is Bob, my mother's name is Ellen, and my sister's name is Jo."_

_"And when's the last time you talked to them?" Sam's face is drawn, accusing. "To any of them?"_

_"Okay. You're upset." Dean suddenly feels like he really needs to calm this guy down and get him out of his apartment. "You're upset, you're confused-"_

_"Yeah, 'cause I only moved here 'cause I just broke up with my fiancee, Madison. But I called her number and I got a damn animal hospital." Sam spits the words._

_"Okay, what are you saying? You trying to say that... that my family isn't real? That we've been injected with fake memories? Come on." Dean struggles to maintain his incredulity, tries to ignore that tug inside him, the same one he got when he saw the ghost, the one that tells him something is wrong. Like a dream, or something._

_"All I know is, I got this feeling in my gut, and I know... I know that, deep down, You've gotta be feeling it too." It's as if Sam reads his mind. "We're supposed to be something else. You're not just some corporate douchebag, this isn't you. I know you."_

_He does feel something, and it is surprisingly difficult for Dean to convince himself that this guy is totally crazy, but he manages, barely. "Know me? You don't know me, pal. You should go."_

_Sam does._

_Screw the master cleanse, Dean thinks. He pulls a bottle of scotch from under the kitchen cabinet where he'd hidden it behind Windex and Ammonia, as if to convince himself that it was in the same category, poison, do not drink._

_He doesn't even pour it out into a glass, instead sinking deep into his sofa and swigging from the bottle with his eyes fixed on the fireplace until his lids become heavy._

The warehouse is dark, and dust hangs in the air, making Dean's throat seize into a cough. His arms and shirt are covered in splattered blood.

"Dude, you okay?" Sam asks. "When the scaffolding fell, I thought..." He chews his lip.

"Nah, I'm good, missed me." Dean smirks with more confidence than feels. "Wolfie here wasn't so lucky, though."

Neither of them can see much of the werewolf under the rubble. They have to pull pieces of metal from the pile of debris until they uncover the mostly-crushed and spluttering body of the creature that was human once. Sam swallows, and Dean knows there's a part of him that, even now, is a little raw about this particular thing. He spares his brother the trouble of dispatching the thing for good by pulling the trigger himself.

He claps Sam on the shoulder, meeting his eyes with a look that seems to ask, _we cool?_ Dean leads the way out of the warehouse, but no foosteps sound behind him, and the ground-floor door somehow finds him stepping through the metal frame and into the front door of his own apartment.

_Odd,_ He thinks, but not so odd that he spends much time questioning it. Dean Smith loosens his tie and turns the dial on the gas fireplace.

"Hello, Dean." Says a stranger in a trenchcoat.

Dean purses his lips. "Who are you?"

The man swallows hard and blinks several times in rapid succession, as if he had half-expected to be recognized.

"I said, who are you?" Dean reaches for his hip, but nothing is there, and he isn't sure why his hand went there in the first place. "How did you get in here?"

His eyes are wide, full of confusion, fear, and struggle, and something else Dean can't quite place. Dean feels something flip in his belly and a flush creeps up his neck and onto his face as the stranger crosses the room and, with the look of self-loathing consternation usually reserved for half-mad serial killers in films, he reaches for Dean's face.

Dean is stock still where he stands, feeling almost outside his own body as this dark haired someone anchors his palms on Dean's cheeks, so he can pull him in close enough to press dry lips against his. When their mouths meet, Dean remembers something - _Cas,_ that's his name, making him a stranger with a name, at least, so Dean thinks absently that he must know him from somewhere, and that will have to be good enough.

A switch has been flipped and he is unfrozen, something in him unfurling, crying out _finally._ Just when Cas is about to pull away, defeated and embarrassed, Dean unexpectedly leans into his kiss, parting Cas' lips with his own.

Cas makes a little noise - half surprise and half relief - as he stumbles backward. His balance is lost and he is sure he'll fall until he feels the warm pressure on the small of his back, Dean's hand supporting him, holding him, safe, saving him again, even just from stumbling,_ even when he doesn't know who you are,_ Cas thinks to himself. Perhaps Zachariah was right. He explores, experiments, darts his tongue across the swollen curve of Dean's lip, provoking a low sound that gives Cas a pleasant shudder when he hears it.

Dean pulls his head back. "You're strange, you know that?" He says, corners of his mouth upticked. "I don't usually go for, you know..."

"I understand." Cas looks away, but does not close his eyes, because if he closes his eyes, he will see it again - Anna's kiss, her forehead on Dean's, a thing Cas had never even imagined he would ever want until he had stood before it. His heart sinks, he flips through a list of suitable angels in his mind, sure that if he explains the situation to Zachariah, he will be happy to put someone else in charge of...

"Hey, hey don't..." Dean is breathless and unable to suppress this little smile, wanting nothing more than to kiss the worry off Cas' face. "I was trying to say, I don't know, you're different. I think I can make an exception. Okay?"

He starts at Cas' temple, planting slow, tender kisses where his skin meets his hairline, giving Cas a chance to collect the anxiety in his lungs and sigh it out before the line of his attention curls inward - Dean kisses the corner of Cas' mouth in a way that makes Cas' whole face start to tingle.

Cas feels, awkward, out of place, he doesn't know what to do with his hands, and then Dean's lips press against his jaw and travel down his neck and his head swims. He presses himself against the edges of the vessel, relishing in the feelings that jump along his skin, letting out a small-voiced whine of disappointment when Dean draws back. All at once he understands what some of his brothers saw in this, why they pursued it seemingly so unnecessarily.

"Hey, uh..." Dean's lips are red from raking over Cas' stubble. Cas' breath is uneven, hitching, and something seems off. "Are you okay?"

Dean's face is in front of his, wide green eyes seeking contact, affirmation, and Cas is afraid of what will happen if he gives it. He doesn't _want_ someone else being there, helping Dean, answering his prayers, healing him when he is wounded, the idea stings in a way it shouldn't.

He feels the fragility of the world Zachariah has built - Dean's memories have already filtered into his dreams, they could do so again, he could go lucid as he is so good at doing now, or Zachariah could decide to check in, there are too many possibilities, too many scenarios that end in the unacceptable.

He wrestles with the thick pulse of_ want_ and eventually is victorious. He can do without this, but to feel like he has taken advantage, or to be forced to abandon Dean's presence entirely?

It is a risk too big to take.

Suddenly, with the soft sound like a flag in the wind, Dean's arms are empty.

_In the morning, when Dean Smith's alarm rouses him, he is unsettled. He thinks he has had a strange dream, but like every dream he has had for the past three weeks, he cannot seem to remember it._


	12. The Rapture

**THE RAPTURE**

The day is pleasantly cloudy, Dean thinks, he doesn't even need sunglasses to watch the little ball bob on the surface of the lake. He listens to the sound of the water lapping against the underside of the little wooden pier, birds in the distance, the breeze through the fall foliage that brushes his kneecaps, exposed by the rips in his jeans.

It's all very familiar, he thinks. It reminds him of something. Swimming? No, it isn't swimming, but it's _like_ swimming. In the water, under the water, his mind lazily turns the question over and over, until finally_ standing at the bottom of the lake _forms in his thoughts like letters assembling in alphabet soup. Standing at the bottom of the lake... holding Cas, wrapping him in his arms, showing him comfort.

The memory feeds him knowledge that slips down his throat like phlegm - dreaming. He is dreaming of the same lake, the same pier, the same trees. He didn't mean to return here, so why did he?

A wish comes unbidden, rising through him like bubbles in champagne, that Cas would return too.

Castiel hears it. He wishes he hadn't.

He doesn't approach Dean right away, a hesitation born partially of embarassment, though he knows Dean does not recall Dean Smith's dreams, but Castiel is also almost loathe to disturb the peace Dean has here. His body's heart quickens its pace at the prospect that Dean came back to this place, or at least, allowed himself to come back. That he did not ruin it.

But the car with its horn will come anyway - Castiel monitors the time outside and it's passing much faster than the time in here. He can't delay much longer, the car will come, and Dean will wake, and if he hasn't delivered his message...

Risks, always so many risks, always too big.

Castiel admires the foliage behind Dean, unmonitored by him and yet still so stable and detailed, when did his dreams get so strong? _They've always been,_ Castiel knows, he saw the nightmares. They had no less power, even if Dean couldn't control them, he was still creating them. He wonders if even _Dean_ knows the extent of what he is capable of.

He holds a wish as well, a wish for more time, less pressure, a space for Dean to explore this strange talent and harness it - something not for Sam, or for strangers, or for heaven, but just for himself, for once.

When he cannot delay any longer, he approaches quietly.

"We need to talk." Cas says. Perhaps he had approached too quietly, judging by Dean's mild startlement.

"I'm dreaming, aren't I?" He says, in case Cas didn't know he was lucid, a kind of passive 'heads up.'

"It's not safe here." Cas says. "Someplace more private."

A bit absurd, Dean thinks. "More private? We're inside my head."

"Exactly. Someone could be listening."

This is without a doubt one of the most alarming things, Dean thinks, that Castiel, angel of the lord, creature that raised him from hell, and frequent purveyor of bad news, could _possibly_ say to him. He tries to think of something more unsettling before realizing that if such a thing exists, he doesn't want to know it.

"Cas," he asks, "What's wrong?"

"Meet me here." Cas slips a piece of paper into his hand. "Go, now."

How does Cas expect him to read in dream? But to his surprise, it's as functional as any other written message. Angel mojo, he supposes. Here he'd been hoping to see Cas, but not like this. He hardly even has time to be annoyed that he was all business before the car-horn comes.

_The sound rattles him out of slumber precisely when it was meant to. He knows how fragile dream memories can be, so he does not move a muscle before making sure he remembers what it said on Cas' paper. From then after, he does not waste time._

* * *

_It hurts to look at him. Jimmy Novak, with his rumpled suit and his righteous indignation and his blue, blue eyes that are not Cas' eyes at all, somehow. Dean's heart aches._

_"How long?" Jimmy demands, anger and distress rolling off him in waves._

_Dean catches himself thinking of how different his anger is to Cas', how helpless Jimmy's rage is in contrast. He stays quiet just long enough that Sam gets the message loud and clear and jumps in again._

_"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it." Sam says, feeling distinctly unhelpful but having little choice. Sam has been doing a lot of the talking, more than usual. Dean is sure Sam doesn't know why, but he is just as sure that Sam can tell he's in pain. It would hardly be Sam if he didn't._

_"Where you going?" Dean forces out when Jimmy tries to leave. He doesn't move, but Sam does, heading Jimmy off at the pass with a height and width that Dean thinks would make him an excellent bouncer, should things somehow permanently cease to go bump in the night._

_"To see my wife and daughter, okay?" Jimmy insists._

_"No, you're not." Sam's eyes are deadlocked with Jimmy's like he's trying to Jedi-mind-trick him. Instead he is appealing to Jimmy's love for his family - no less manipulative, in Dean's opinion. "You're just going to put those people in danger."_

_"So, what... now I'm a prisoner?" Fear vibrates through Jimmy's voice, but whether it's demons or Sam that that he fears, Dean doesn't know._

_"Harsh way to put it." Sam concedes._

_They don't talk much more. Jimmy admits his exhaustion, Dean supposes he has months of sleep debt to repay, and he isn't able to stay awake long once the option to do otherwise presents itself. When Dean starts yawning, Sam offers to keep an eye on things and let him rest._

It starts as a nightmare, straight away, no scare-foreplay like he usually gets, no ramp-up. Sammy is in front of him in the hospital bed, tubes snaking from every orifice, a respirator providing him artificial breaths. It gets him completely, the gentle beeping, the hiss of the machines, the steady blur of hushed conversation at the nurse's station on the other side of the door.

Sammy has not been awake for four months. Dean has visited every day, brought in whatever friends he could find, tried to pray, tried to deal, but all to no avail. The memories are fuzzy, but he doesn't have any need to examine them.

Today, a new terror descends upon Dean when, on an intuition, an impulse, he pulls back the sheet that covers his comatose brother. His shirt is torn, revealing a bandage over his heart. Dean looks around to be sure there are no nurses or doctors nearby, and with all discretion, he turns the lock into place.

One pump on the hand sanitizer dispenser, and another, and another, and another, he smears the cold clear gel nearly up to his elbows before he so much as touches the bandage. His forefinger and thumb delicately press together around the cloth tape and lift the gauze to reveal what he feared - the tattoo is gone.

His heart pounds. He presses the gauze back against the raw skin left over and narrows his eyes at Sam's body.

"Whoever you are... wake up. I know you're in there."

Sam's eyes open, black as pitch to be sure, but without the usual coldness of a demon's gaze.

"Don't hurt me. Don't hurt me, okay?" Says Sam's voice. "I'm sorry your... this guy, his name was Sam?"

"_Is_ Sam." Dean growls, sounding less human than the demon.

From somewhere else in the hospital, he hears a scream, and it stirs something in him. He knows pain, he knows torment, giving, receiving, knows it like it runs in his blood and seeps from his pores and that is a scream of the utmost agony.

"I'm sorry man." Says Sam's mouth. "I really am. But you have no idea how long I waited, I-"

"Well that's too damn bad 'cause you fucked up. He's still in there and you're gonna be all kinds of boned before you can blink." Dean threatens, but his voice shakes.

"That's what I'm trying to tell you, dude. I swear to you, he's gone. Call me a... vegetarian, or whatever, I don't steal meatsuits, I just use the castaways. Ask anybody. I'm just trying to stay outta hell and get by." Sam's face is sympathetic, compassionate.

Dean's never trusted a demon before, and he doesn't intend to start, but he thinks of Sam, what Sam would feel, what Sam would want, and the feeling of things becoming more complex weighs heavy on him, the simple black and white twisting into a muddled, fetid gray.

He closes his eyes and tries to slow his breathing, tries to think, but there's that _scream_ again, low and hollow and terrible, it sends a wave of nausea over Dean and at the crest of its unpleasantness he puts a name to that tormented voice.

_Cas._

Dean nearly breaks in half. The scream is cut off by a choked sob and a heave of breath, he doesn't know how he can hear it, but he can, and the feeling is overwhelming - Sam gone, Cas broken, he has failed in every meaningful way. Wretched, useless, pointless, he is crushed under the weight of himself. He wishes he could just dissolve into the air and relieve the world of his worthless...

_"Wake up, he's gone."_

_Dean has never been more relieved hear Sam's irritated... Sam-voice. He isn't even mad that Jimmy had crept off on Sam's watch, not even pressured by Sam's hurry, much to Sam's chagrin. Ah, Sam's chagrin, how sweet it is to be bitched at by waking, healthy Sam. Dean can't help but laugh and make light, considering._

_There is a kernel of distress at how compelling his nightmares have gotten, but it is all washed away by the wave of deliverance that is waking._

_Little to his surprise, his breather won't last long. Anna will deliver the news, that Castiel is under the thumb of Heaven's little re-education squad. His dream will rush back all at once, his stomach will drop and his blood will turn to ice when that _sound_ echoes again in the wake of her words._

_Dean will not dream of Castiel again before the rise of Lucifer. In the intervening evenings after Castiel returns from heaven, Dean will pray, he will shout, he will swear, he will conjure his own nightmares and lay himself bare before them, allow them to tear him to shreds, and still, Castiel will act as though he has no more than an obligation to tolerate Dean Winchester. _

_What makes Dean hate himself the most of all, when push comes to shove on that fateful day, is that no matter how much he wants to hate Castiel, to rage against him, to cut him out of Dean's life, he can't. He wouldn't know where to start._


	13. Sympathy for the Devil

**SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL**

_The Regent Hotel does not live up to the formality of its name, Dean thinks in the wee hours, musing on how it always seems to be the rattiest holes in the wall with the most regal sounding titles. He is exhausted but kept up by a seeming inability to stop reviewing the events at Chuck's house. _

_The sun is rising and he has hardly slept, drifting in and out of nothingness, losing time but never gaining energy. Sam is even worse, to the point where he is getting out of bed, movements exaggerated by tired frustration, and dressing to go out._

_Dean asks him where he's going. The look on Sam's face is like that of a sick cat that wants to crawl into a closet to die in peace, and he says he needs some air. Dean fixes him with a long look, one that Sam can translate easily – this is what Dean likes about being around Sam, he doesn't have to speak – one that says 'don't be an idiot.' _

_Sam actually nods, as if Dean had spoken, as if they'd had a whole conversation there in the dark silence of the motel room. He closes his eyes again, feeling a wave of sleepiness and not wanting to waste it._

The snow is several inches thick on the ground, glittering like millions of tiny mirrors coating everything. There is nothing but snow for miles, until at the edge of the horizon; Dean can see the edge of a dark forest, the boughs of the trees sagging under the weight. The only other thing that disrupts the endless frozen flatland is a high mound of snow several yards away, an oblong shape jutting out of the ground like a tiny hill.

He doesn't know where he is, but he has been here before. His jaw tenses as he searches his surroundings for something, anything, that'd give him a clue he could follow. A long, slow breath comes out of his mouth and hangs in the air as vapor below a gray-white sky.

Dean looks down into the snow at his feet, watches it wet his boots and melt around the hems of his jeans, and suddenly it comes to him. He drops to his knees, ignoring the cold that seeps through the denim, and brushes away the little crystals with his bare hands. His fingers turn red as he digs, but he doesn't stop until he gets to the ground.

Yellow green grass lays against the cold soil, and something else, something he didn't know he was looking for until he found it. _(Like so many things, Dean thinks.)_

Purple wildflowers.

Dean's throat tightens, he can't swallow, he can't breathe. Something about the flowers, with their broken stems and crushed blossoms, makes his heart ache. He rises to his feet and runs to the mound of snow that breaks up the vista – just like the flower, there's something under it, something he'll know he's looking for when he finds it.

He plunges his arms into the mound and starts throwing snow in all directions. His fingers are going numb. He keeps scraping and digging until it sits in front of him, the thing he (_suddenly but always_) knew he'd find: a plaid chesterfield sofa.

"Cas! Cas, c'mon, I'm dreaming, I'm here dreaming!" He shouts to the sky, and then adds quietly, "Please. I just want to know you can hear me. I m-"

Dean chokes on his words before he can say, _I miss you. _

"I'm here." Castiel declares.

Dean's breath catches in his chest when he sees him standing behind the couch and suddenly the snow is melting fast in fits and starts like a time-lapse video of spring.

"I heard you." Dean manages to say, though his voice breaks. He stumbles and babbles, "I heard you, what they did to you, I don't know what they did and I thought it was a dream but then Anna told me that you were…"

Castiel is watching the snow seep into the ground, wondering if Dean knows he has nothing to do with it, that it's all Dean - though it doesn't seem to be deliberate. He is wondering if he can take any meaning from it.

"I'm sorry." He says, brows furrowing in thought, "Are you certain? That shouldn't even be possible."

"Like that's some kind of obstacle. I've done six impossible things this morning, want to go for breakfast at Milliways?" Dean scoffs, something between a grumble and a laugh, "_Angels_ shouldn't even be possible."

Castiel swallows, his eyes are too big and too bright for him to hide the way he takes that, like Dean is _wishing_… so he looks down. He finds the snow nearly gone. New shoots of grass are pushing their way up through the edge of the wet dirt.

Dean crosses around to the other side of the sofa and leans back against it, half-sitting on the back edge. Being wrapped tight in the dream keeps him from thinking too hard, from analyzing or controlling the impulse that makes him reach out to Cas to gently lift his chin, pull him from the mire of self-blame.

When Cas complies, when he raises his face and Dean meets his eyes, the white of the sky fills them with light and they are so bright they nearly hurt to look at, but Dean doesn't _want_ to look away.

"I thought…" Dean mutters absently. _I thought I would never see you again, I thought that you were gone, I thought I'd failed you. I _did _fail you. _

"I'm sorry." Cas says, a bit absurdly. The tension around Cas' mouth and eyes falls away. The place along his jaw where Dean touched him is still warm – he is so rarely touched at all, it feels strange and he wants to press his own fingers against it.

For what? Dean thinks, for being captured? For being tortured? Something thrums through his body at the reminder of that, a sharp, visceral pain of an empty place like stabbing the inside of a decayed tooth. And from that pain had come an understanding, a "seeing behind the curtain" of the things that Dean had so carefully boxed away and hidden even from his own mind. No matter how he tries, he cannot unlearn, he cannot forget.

He opens his mouth, _almost_ saying ten thousand things, and then closes it again without saying even one. Instead, he lets his forehead fall forward until it touches Castiel's.

Cas is silent. When their heads meet his eyes fall shut, overcome by the calm that envelops him then. Inside his vessel he is rushing and eddying against that little spot of contact with such focus that he has to remind himself to keep the rest upright, breathing, functioning.

_You don't do that,_ says a voice in Dean's head that sounds remarkably like his father's_, _but for once in his life he has little trouble ignoring it – his dream is like a bell jar, with all his fears and pressures and reservations unable to reach them, no matter how they rattle and pound at the outside.

_Dean startles awake, unsure why until he realizes that Sam is still gone, and the jolt of anxiety drowns out everything else until Sam responds to a text message, letting Dean know he's on his way back. _

_He pulls himself from bed, but an unsettled feeling won't leave him be – he is outside the bell jar now, left alone with the work of dodging his own mind, keeping his focus external to himself through the meditative act of gun maintenance. He is nearly finished when Sam returns. _


	14. Free To Be You And Me

**FREE TO BE YOU AND ME**

_"What's so funny?"_

_Cas watches the corners of Dean's eyes crinkle, and he thinks that he has never seen him smile like this before, without any deceit or manipulation beneath it, and the laughter is like a tonic, an antidote to all the pressure and the anxiety that has poisoned him, poisoned both of them. Dean had thought that coming to this… place… would help him in some way – he had assumed that Dean would be wrong, of course, but in the end, it is the deviation from the 'plan' that has proved him right and been for the best._

_Somehow, that seems to keep happening._

_Dean's relief and glee is infectious, and feeling as though he somehow caused it makes Cas especially vulnerable to catching it. The corners of his mouth stretch into a smile that is just enough to show teeth. This smiling, laughing, shoulder-touching Dean almost makes him double take a bit – it is the kind of thing that Cas usually only sees when Dean is unconscious, disarmed._

_"Oh—nothing—it's been a long time since I've laughed that hard." Dean admits, chuckling as he makes his way around the car. "It's been more than a long time, years."_

_He knows Dean and dreams both better than to try to speak of them aloud in the waking world. He knows that if Dean wishes to speak of it, he will. And Castiel will wait._

_"Hey, uh…" Dean ventures once they've returned to the abandoned house. His pause is long, long enough for him to get Cas' full attention, lock eyes with him. "I think I should get a little rest, before… you know."_

_Something clicks and Castiel hears it – the way something hangs heavy on the thread of his voice like too many birds on a wire, the way he holds a gaze for a little too long – this has never been Castiel's strong suit, but he has observed Dean enough that he is aware that humans are often speaking more or different things than the words they choose, and that Dean is a fairly extreme example of this._

_"Yes." Cas replies in a tone transparently full of caution. "That might be wise. I'll wake you when it's time to go."_

_Dean finds a soft, if dirty, armchair and lays down a fleece blanket he pulled out of the car to cover the worst of the dust. He has become an expert at sleeping in strange places._

"I didn't do this." Dean says to no one, looking up at the night sky. Goosebumps prickle up his arms and over his shoulders at the sight of it - it's overwhelming. The richness of the dark canopy alone is enough to take his breath away, shades and hues of black and purple and blue melting into one another, Dean cannot tell where one color ends and another begins. It isn't some matte painting background he'd give a dream - it has a depth of forever.

"I _couldn't_ do this." Dean amends.

He imagines that angels can probably see more colors, that he isn't getting the half of it.

Then there's the stars, not the few speckles he sees when they drive through cities, not even the fair smattering out in the American cornfields and dark stretches of highway, not like anything he's ever seen in his life. It's not just the stars themselves, though the sky is so covered in points of brilliance that he cannot see a single dark space, it's also the galaxies, whorls of glowing gas in streaks across the sky.

"I did it." Castiel says.

When Dean turns, he is blinking back tears, overwhelmed and not a bit loathe to admit it.

"Where are we?" He asks.

"Chile." Castiel responds, eyes upturned as he admires his own work. He knows he should not indulge in pride, but he had wanted to impress, and he has clearly been successful. He specifies, "The Atacama Desert."

"Why?"

The smile he gives Dean is warm, but distant. "You seemed to believe that it ought to be special - my last night on Earth."

Dean's voice is quiet. "This isn't what I had in mind..." He swallows at the reminder.

"You like it, then?"

"Dude, does it matter what I think? It's your... thing."

"I made it for you."

It is Dean's turn to not understand.

"I felt that I should do one last thing for you." Cas explains, neutrally.

"I don't get it," Dean says, with every word, stepping closer. "How can you be so chill about this?"

Castiel only shrugs at first, and then he gets a better look at Dean's face - all his blinking has been for naught, and tears are falling one by one, rolling silently down his cheeks and making tracks that shine in the starlight.

"I'm sorry." Cas says, _again._

Dean loses it. As he goes on, his voice rises, his knifehanded gestures get wilder. "You think I want to hear you say that? You stupid-I'm not saying I don't know for a fact I'd break my fist if I punched you right now, but I'm also not saying I wouldn't try anyway if you said that one more time. I'm sick of it. I don't want your sorries, I want you to give a shit about dying, about leaving m-" He blinks, swallows, and corrects: "about leaving us here."

Cas' voice is a snarl. "Who do you think this is all_ for?_"

"Well I don't want it." Dean says. "I-" He stops, takes several quick breaths, and then takes the plunge after all. "I want you. Alive."

Cas has no chance to respond. He puts his hands on the sides of Cas' face and pulls until their mouths mash roughly together (an irony that does not escape Cas) Dean is not gentle, but rather _claiming,_ as if through his palms and his lips he is marking his territory.

Cas hardly has time to be shocked before he rallies, made pliant by the incredible rush of sensory input - the heat of Dean's body against him, the smell of leather and gravel dust and Dean, the faint, strange taste of hops when the tip of his tongue crosses Cas' lips, it is a wonderful invasion of him, and he is losing himself to it.

He flicks his tongue out experimentally, runs it along Dean's swollen lower lip and is rewarded with a low, predatory groan, and Dean's hands running up his back until they skim across that place between his shoulder blades and he is undone, moaning into Dean's mouth but it's too much and he is scrabbling at Dean's arms, clutching and hanging on them, he can't take it.

Dean comes away panting, frowning, searching Cas' face. "Did I hurt-" Panic and lust fight for dominance in the rough scrape of his voice, but both are decimated by shock when he catches sight of those great black shapes again.

"Wings." Castiel gasps. "Not hurt. I didn't expect..."

Dean's eyes slide over them, he didn't see them before, he isn't sure if he _summoned_ them somehow, or he was just reminded enough to see again, he doesn't know. They're ruffled and tense and he wants to touch them.

"So they have... feelings?" Dean doesn't step back, is so close that Cas can hardly see him without seeing double.

Cas swallows, catches his breath. "They are part of me, not the vessel, but my true form. I don't think anyone has ever touched that place where the two..." he reaches for the right word, and finds it, "intersect."

Dean closes his eyes and releases a long sigh. _I only discover this now,_ he thinks. The idea of raking his fingertips down Cas' back nearly makes him dizzy, and wishes they'd met in some other time or place, maybe one where he himself wasn't so stupid. He lowers himself slowly to the dusty hardpan and lays out on his back, filling his vision with stars.

"That was probably all kinds of, uh, smite-worthy, wasn't it?" He asks.

"Not especially." Cas follows him to the ground and sits cross-legged beside him.

"So I'm just allowed to make out with an angel?" Dean asks, "And a dude, at that?"

"In practice, the latter is something of an advantage. A nephilim cannot be created by two male bodies, after all." Cas points out thoughtfully.

The implication is not lost on Dean. He lifts himself up onto his elbow. "You gotta promise me something."

"What?"

"That you're going to survive."

Cas looks away. "Dean, I'm I afraid I-"

"No." Dean interrupts. "You don't just go waltzing into- you can't, alright?" His voice  
cracks.

_You can't just do this, be this to me, and then disappear forever. That can't be all there is. It just can't._ Dean wants to say, but his mouth won't make the words. Instead he shifts his position on the desert floor until his head is resting in Cas' lap, a gesture almost somehow more intimate than their kiss.

_Cas makes sure that Dean wakes gently. They do not speak of the events of this dream any more than they have spoken of any other. They are settled comfortably into the terror of what lies on their road before them, more pressing matters are at hand. The only time it is so much as referenced in speech is once - Overwhelmed by his relief that Castiel has survived, Dean lowers his guard, and when pressed about his condition, he answers:_

_"I don't know. Honestly? I'm good. I can't believe I'm saying that, but I am. I'm really good."_

_It's no mystery why._


	15. The End

THE END

_Zachariah's face, thankfully, disappears from before Dean's eyes. It is replaced by the streetlights on a dark, damp highway somewhere in the night. He turns quickly, and just as quickly, is almost overtaken by relief._

_"That was pretty nice timing, Cas." He is unable to suppress the little smile when he looks Cas up and down, taking in not just Cas, but his Cas, his calm solemnity, his too-straight posture, his sobriety._

_"We had an appointment." He answers._

_Dean's feels a twist in his chest, like wringing water from a sponge, and the muscles in his face all tense, he thinks he might cry. He takes in a long quiet breath, but does not take his eyes off Cas' - he is treasuring this, a little, drinking in the light in Cas' eyes, after having had to see them snuffed out, he can't help himself._

_He reaches for Cas, and in the moment when his hand makes contact with the trenchcoat, he feels warmth sliding up his arm. It requires no small amount of self control to stay at arms length, to stop from pulling him in close, and..._

_"Don't ever change." Dean demands, in a tone not unlike the one he'd so recently demanded that Cas survive his ordeal with Raphael. His insistence had worked out fine the first time, he thinks._

_He has to let his arm fall. It almost hurts to lose contact but he doesn't trust himself._

_"How did Zachariah find you?" Cas asks, watching Dean rifle through his pockets._

_"Long story. Let's just stay away from Jehovah's Witnesses from now on, okay?"_

_"What are you doing?" Cas sees him dial._

_Dean lifts the phone to his ear as he says, "Something I should have done in the first place."_

_When he drives to meet Sam, Dean floors it nearly all the way through the empty night, exhausted but unwilling to wait any longer than he has to. He arrives at the designated place so early that he sees no harm in a nap - he isn't sure whether he could have been considered asleep while in Zachariah's little nightmarescape, but he sure doesn't feel like he was. He doesn't even have to lie down - he rests his head against the window and sleep curls in around him._

"Shouldn't you go to sleep" says Cas, bearded and bleary, in the seat next to him.

The car rumbles along the broken road. He's back in 2014.

Cas goes on, "If you're not gonna take the pills, you should probably get a nap."

Dean feels nauseated. "And what would that be, a dream within a-" _ah._ He's not real. He's not... that. Dean leans forward and breathes out the fear, lets his shoulders fall.

Dean puts out his hand and closes his eyes, he concentrates on not so much_ imagining_ that the car is stopping, but believing it. The car slows at first, and then stops. When he opens his eyes, he's gone too far: the bench seat of the car is floating in a dark world with no walls, no floor, just the seat, the darkness, and this version of Cas that won't leave his mind.

He should dismiss him, Dean thinks. He should wave his hands and watch this drugged-out shell of a facsimile dissipate like a the poison fog he is.

"But you won't." This Cas says.

"You're not real." Dean jabs a finger inches from his face.

"It doesn't matter." One side of his mouth creeps up, and then suddenly, he is smiling - not his Cas' shy smile, but a cheshire grin under blank eyes, like something that's been dead for months. His eyes are hooded and he speaks through his teeth, "You want me. I could do _anything,_ and you'd still want me, you stupid piece of shit."

Dean's elbows are on his knees, his head is on his hands, tears are falling down into the nothing beneath them. "Shut up."

"No." Says Cas, inches from Dean's ear, breath brushing skin, "No, I don't think that's what you want, _Deeaannnnn._" He stretches the name out, and Dean feels stretched in kind, almost to the point where he would break, but not quite.

Cas' teeth toy with Dean's earlobe. "Isn't _this_ what you wanted?" He whispers as he kisses his way down Dean's neck. "Because in a few years, it's what you _will _want. It's what you'll _take. _I mean, I'm too high to feel a damn thing, but you're not gonna care about that, because you're gonna-"

"NO." Dean growls, but when he sits up all at once, sweeping his arm violently through the space, something stops him - a fist catches his forearm and stops it in its path. When he opens his eyes, all he sees is _blue_, two points of blue shining in the dark like lights to guide him home.

"What did you see?" Says a voice that is at once identical and completely different from the one that spoke to him a moment ago.

_Cas,_ real Cas, his Cas. That's all he can process at first, hardly even noticing the way the space lights up like dawn. On the plaid chesterfield sofa, Cas' hands are gripping Dean's shoulders and all he can think about his how beautiful that trenchcoat sleeve is, how much he'd miss it if it were gone, and the feeling of Cas' hand pressing on the mark _he_ made. Dean's head spins.

"What did he show you?" Cas repeats.

Dean's laugh is at himself, a mockery of his own tears. "It was you, but it wasn't-He showed me the future, the one that happens if I don't say yes."

"Zachariah is- whatever he showed you, it's not real." Cas' voice is thunder. "Do you understand? It wasn't real, it isn't real, and it _will never_ be real."

"The hell do you know" Dean puts both hands on Cas' chest and shoves him away. He regrets it instantly. "What if it is? What if it could be?" He is shouting, shaking.

"It won't happen."

"But what if it does? If you think there's_ anything_ I wouldn't do to stop that..." There's that finger again. Dean trails off. He suddenly wishes he hadn't pushed Cas away, suddenly needs to be close to him, needs to touch his face, needs to know everything is right, just _needs. (It's what you will want,_ says something in his mind.)

He reaches forward and grabs Cas' tie from the bottom and wraps it around his hand again, and again, and again, shortening the distance between them until Cas' body hovers inches over him where he lays back against the arm of the couch.

"Dean, are you sure that..." Cas can't stop looking at Dean's mouth.

"Please." Dean says, moments before their lips touch. Cas' body holds himself up against the couch-arm with one hand and lets the other curl into Dean's hair. He doesn't hold back, he explores Dean's mouth with a hungry heat.

When the pressure on his neck eases - when Dean has let go of the tie - he lifts his head just enough to press kisses along Dean's chin and cheek, everywhere there's the shadow of stubble, Cas lavishes.

"Cas," Dean whispers, "Cas I- I'm sorry, I, I'm not... I mean... everything is just..." _(It's what you'll take, _says the voice inside him.)

A long breath escapes Cas. He pulls himself back until he is sitting on his heels at he other end of the sofa. He doesn't want to admit that he doesn't understand, so he doesn't say anything at all. He gets a better look at Dean and sees that he is jaw is shaking, his head tilted limply back over the armrest, such that the tears slide into his hair.

"He could hurt you, to get to me." Dean says, seemingly to the sky.

"I suppose he could." Cas admits.

"But he didn't show me that, Cas. I mean, in a world where you're holding orgies and wasted out of your mind all the time, that fucked up escapism, where do you think you'd learn shit like that? It sure as hell isn't Zachariah. It's me. You follow me into oblivion. Or you will." Dean turns on his side and curls his legs up to his chest.

"He would have shown you anything." Cas explains as gently as he can.

"I'm the one who hurts you. And this is how it starts. And I can't." Dean says, and digs his fingernails into his palm.

_He stirs awake. His forehead is cold and red where it has pressed against the glass, and his limbs are stiff. He stretches slow before stepping out for some fresh air, and to wait until the other car emerges through the grass and brush._


	16. Fallen Idols

**FALLEN IDOLS**

"_Yo." Sam greets Dean with a faint smile. "No luck, I guess?"_

"_I uh…" Dean fumbles. He thinks of the girl in the bar, how hard he tried to be into her, how it just didn't click. But it's easier to lie. "Nope – met a girl, but she blew me off. Kind of a bummer about the car, huh?" _

"_Um. Sure." Sam elects not to make anything of the abrupt change of subject. _

_He watches Dean, brows furrowed, and tries to figure out what he's doing. Dean's brought back a black plastic bag and he's taking out what Sam considers a seriously odd set of things – a few small dark boxes, a mason jar painted black, a tall thin bottle, a brown paper sack with something inside that rustles. _

_Dean starts to empty the contents of each smaller container into the mason jar._

"_Uh, Dean?" Sam ventures. "Is there something I should know?"_

_Dean makes a noise between a snort and a giggle, which is how he realizes he's still a little tipsy. _

"_Seriously dude…" Sam frowns. "What are you doing?"_

"_Dreams." Dean says. "I got it from…" He hesitates. "Y'know, a person. Who lives around here. Said it would help with the dreams I've been having."_

"_A person?" Concern rises like hot air in Sam's voice. "Is this anyone I know? –Jesus, I can smell it from here."_

"_What, you think I'm gonna go getting some freaky spell drink from just anybody? Trust me, alright? I know it's a little weird, but all things considered, if this works, it's worth it." Dean knows that Sam will think he's referring to hell-nightmares, and he'd just as soon leave it that way._

"_That bad, huh?" Sam says softly._

_Dean looks him in the eye. "Yes." _

_Sam does a weird little half-shrug and turns back to his computer, wincing when he hears Dean drink the concoction. It smells sharp and dry, like the smell of a carpet in a house with a few too many cats. _

"_I was told it might cause uh…" He checks the rolled up paper in the bag. "Drowsiness and amnesia… so y'know, try not to say anything too important tonight, kay?" Dean kicks his shoes off and crawls into the motel bed._

Everything is colors. Shifting colors, spinning colors, something feels important but far away, and Dean can't find it in the mess. The abstract cloud tightens into droplets and they fall, and he is falling with them, falling through the rainbow mist until he sees the surface of water beneath him and takes a big breath before the plunge. It is as if someone dumped a vat of Easter-egg dye into the lake, and it obscures his vision, he can't tell which way is up.

He puts a hand to his mouth and blows a few bubbles – he can swim whichever way the bubbles go.

They go in every direction. _Of course._ Dean rolls his eyes and picks a direction and swims and swims until his lungs are hot and his body demands air. He can't go forever. He kicks and kicks until he can't control it anymore, he coughs out bubbles big and small and his eyes shut tight as he breathes in and braces for the acid burn…

And it never comes. He breathes air, glorious air. When he laughs, no sound comes out, but who cares? He can breathe, and it is wonderful. With the air comes beautiful lucidity – he thinks that the lake is warm and clear, and the dye fizzles into nothing.

He swims in one direction until he reaches a long, curved wall of glass, and follows it around, one hand against the smooth surface until he recognizes the place where he started. It is not a lake, after all, he gleans, but more like a fishbowl with no opening.

And then he sees it, the deep shadow in the hazy darkness outside the glass, the shape of a man in a long coat. His heart drops, and he puts a hand against the glass for a moment before turning around and pushing off the wall with his feet, swimming inward as far as he can go until he can't see the edges anymore.

He knows now: this is the spell, and it worked. Something inside him tears in two, one side thrilling at success and the other sinking, lonely, wishing it had failed, wishing he had some excuse…

But there is none. No excuse he could ever make will make it okay to let his Cas become what he saw in 2014. _His Cas…_ That's the just the problem, isn't it? He thinks. _He's not your Cas. _That's the attitude that future Dean had, that's what he has to avoid. It's hard for him to imagine the things he saw, the things heard, the things he now knows were in his future, nearly impossible to imagine ever hurting Cas or making him do anything he doesn't want, but he's seen it now, plain as day, and he has to stop it at any cost. And the only way to do that is to give up, to surrender, to bury everything he feels and wants until it rots and decays and there's nothing left.

It's the only way to keep Cas safe.

Outside the bubble of Dean's dream, Cas stands in the darkness, looking in, locked away. He had felt it from a distance, when he'd approached Dean's mind, but hadn't believed – Dean wouldn't close him out, surely? His chest tightens when he gets close, feels the detail of the spell, the strength. He knows this ward, and it is powerful and foul.

Something invisible digs into him and pulls like a fishhook buried in his ribs. The truth he doesn't want to believe, but has no choice, is that Dean must have been absolutely desperate to keep him out.

He spreads his wings and is gone, and Dean doesn't even see him leave, his departure nothing more than a slight movement in the shadows that Dean isn't even watching.

"_Dean." Sam nudges him. "Yo, that magic ambien crap worn off yet?"_

"_Uh…" He looks around and coughs away his grogginess. "Yeah, I think so."_

"_Good. The guy called, another guy died, and it's pretty weird, get this, he was shot, but there wasn't…" _

_Dean isn't really paying attention. He is trying to remember his dream, but it won't come. He supposes they weren't kidding around about the amnesia thing. Curiosity aside, it's almost a relief to not think about it. He wonders if the low current of uncertainty and annoyance that follows him through the day is a side effect of the drink, or of the dream, or if it's just him._


	17. I Believe The Children Are Our Future

**I Believe the Children Are Our Future**

_The day has been long and frustrating. The only real lead had been the joke shop, and it doesn't seem like that's the source, but Dean can't sort it out, he turns it over and over in his mind but he can't think of what else it could be._

"_Just go to sleep." Sam says again. "There's nothing we can do right now. We'll keep looking in the morning."_

_Dean stares down the Mason jar. He's been holding onto his leftovers, unable to imagine that it gets much more disgusting with age. A few swallows every night before bed has given him dreams he can't remember and nights that don't feel right. He's sick of it – the flavor, the woozy feeling before he falls asleep, the grogginess in the morning, the amnesia, and he's pretty sure it's grating on Sam as well. _

_Somewhere inside, Dean knows he's making excuses not to drink, trying to cover the real reason he doesn't want it, but he doesn't listen to that part. In his exhaustion and his frustration, selfishness reigns and he shoves the jar back in his bag and climbs into bed unaided. _

Dean is buried. Literally, he is buried beneath the ground. Soil and pebbles and darkness press in against all parts of him. He tenses his muscles, one by one, wiggling and shifting to create empty space. The dirt around him moves without too much struggle, so he imagines that he must not be too deep, that if he keeps at it, he can break through.

He bends his arm at the elbow, just a little a first, then more and more, nudging the earth away until there's space to move his arm. He makes a fist and rotates it until there's space to splay his fingers. He is patient, and eventually he grabs at fistfuls of dirt above him and pulls and drags and digs until one hand, and then arm, is free.

From there, it's a matter of pulling dirt from over his face, his other arm, and bit by bit he digs himself out until he can sit up. When his bare torso rises up from the dirt and he gets a look around, he suddenly remembers where he is, the same place he has been most nights – underwater. Frustration boils in him, he didn't have a drop, but he's still here?

He closes his eyes and chooses a place he knows in detail, a place that's easy to imagine: his childhood home. Imagines standing in the kitchen, the grain pattern of the fake wood cupboard, the stains on the fridge, but when he opens his eyes, he hasn't budged.

Fear seeps into his irritation as he imagines that he has, perhaps, done some permanent damage to his ability to dream. He wonders if he should have maybe mentioned the lucid dreaming thing, when he asked for the recipe. He wonders if he is stuck here forever.

Beyond this, there is a more immediate concern: He cannot seem to move his legs independently of one another. He shifts them together beneath the layers of silt, pressing down on the substrate with his hands until his bottom half comes free and he gets a good look at the reason for the problem:

His "legs" are not legs. Beneath his navel, the skin of his torso rapidly gets thicker, almost rubbery, and everything below the hip is clearly _tail, _mostly a pale gray-blue, but with a broad and blurry white streak down the front, like he's had the back half of a dolphin fused onto his torso.

_I'm a mer…whatever. _He thinks absently.

It is unsettling at first, but he quickly gets used to it, he can't help enjoying a kind of power and speed that he's never felt in the water before, and as the water rushes past around him, he recalls that he cannot remember there ever being a bottom to the water in these dreams in the first place, and no matter how far he swims, he can't find the wall.

So it is different. Good. The relief lifts a weight and he tries a few tricks, barreling through a school of fish and flipping his tail hard, speeding toward the surface (there's a surface!) for what he hopes will be a jump.

It doesn't fail him. He breaks the glassy top and flies into the air. Time slows and he reaches the crest of his leap, where he twists and spins grandly, finally aiming his head down and coming in smooth with a minimal splash.

The little smile that had snuck onto his face when he realized his freedom from the bubble is now an enormous, tooth-filled grin.

There is a splash behind him. When he twirls around to see what made it, his blood runs cold. It's a blur, at first, but he's fooling himself if he doesn't identify it instantly: Dark hair on a pale, slender torso, and a deep charcoal tail, just like his.

Dean swallows thickly and then tries to speak, to warn Cas away, but nothing comes out, just a few errant bubbles that drift lazily upward to the surface.

_Dean._ Cas' mouth forms his name silently. His face is the picture of ache and Dean doesn't care, he can't care about his good intentions, shit, if he was selfish enough to go to bed unguarded, he can be selfish now.

He swims toward Cas, tail pumping up and down, desperate for speed, desperate to be close, and then he _is _close and he doesn't even think before he wraps his arms around Cas' shoulders and buries his nose in the crook of Cas' neck.

He wants to say he's sorry, so much, but all he can do is lift his head up and run his fingertips down the side of Cas' face, around the corner of his jaw, and up into his hair. Dean tugs gently until their foreheads touch. Cas mirrors the gesture, grasping at Dean's hair and tilting his face forward until their lips meet softly as if to say _it's okay, it's alright. _

Dean can't resist that. Whatever he thought he was doing, being a martyr, he can't do it, he doesn't want to do it. He surrenders to the warmth of Cas' lips and slips his fingers down Cas' back to where skin turns to tail, and he presses their bodies together, twisting the flipper of his tail around the back of Cas', like he wants nothing to separate them.

_Skin, _Dean thinks hazily, so much skin. He feels Cas slip his tongue through his lips and Dean shudders against him, their bodies slipping together. He nips at Cas' lower lip, and opens his eyes to see Cas' flutter shut with the sensation.

It is heartbreaking when the klaxon sound pierces through and it all splinters to bits.

_Dean wakes with a start, ready to roll out of bed and fight, but it is only a car alarm in the parking lot outside. He sighs and takes in another long breath, trying to slow his pounding heart – he isn't sure if it's the car alarm or the dream or both, but every nerve is awake and he isn't feeling like sleep at all. _

_He's awake first today, so he's the one who fields the call from the hospital about the new development, and real hope for something useful takes root inside him. _

_This time, he remembers his dream, and no matter how selfish, he doesn't want to let it go. _


	18. Abandon All Hope

**ABANDON ALL HOPE...**

_A twangy electric guitar takes the place of the original flute in _Oye Como Va. _Jo prefers the Tito Puente to the Santana version that now fills the kitchen, but Ellen has warned her against saying anything to Bobby about it. She watches her mother knock back a shot (pinky up) and is unable to suppress the little smile that pushes at her mouth._

_"Alright, big boy." Ellen challenges Castiel. "Go." _

_Castiel doesn't need to be told a second time. He doesn't _look_ terribly excited, but neither does he hesitate much - he's seen enough of this, of human drinking rituals, thousands of years of minor variation on the same theme, and yet something deep inside him does thrill a little at taking part as a friend. He wonders if his participation is diminished at all by the fact that he could cleanse the alcohol from his vessel's blood in an instant, if he had to, if it's too safe for it to have meaning to anyone else._

_He handles the glasses gently between his fingers, scooping up the next the instant the last clacks against the table. He swallows each shot the moment it hits his tongue, he hardly has a chance to taste it at all, but the heat prickles own his throat and spreads through his chest. Warm. He feels warm. It recalls the feeling of Dean's skin on his._

_"I think I'm starting to feel something." He declares, to the amusement of both Ellen and Jo. _

_A slow smile spreads the corners of Ellen's mouth. "I bet you are, kiddo."_

_"Mom!" Jo smacks Ellen's shoulder with the back of her hand, a little too knowingly - it is a blatant enough gesture that it catches Castiel's attention._

_"Am I... missing something?" He asks, eyes wide and blue, darting from Ellen to Jo and back again. _

_"You're feeling something, alright, and it ain't the liquor." A laugh like smoke and gravel escapes Ellen. She jerks her head a little, a subtle point into the next room where Sam and Dean sit across a table from one another. "Specifically about the elder Winchester, am I right, son?"_

_Words bubble up though the warm haze inside him, but none of them make it to his mouth. He merely blinks, then blinks twice more in rapid succession. All at once his breathing is shallow, hurried. His one clear thought is that Dean wouldn't want him to say anything._

_Ellen leans in, the open edges of her button-down grazing the tops of the shot glasses on the table. "Now, I don't make any claim to know what's goin' on between you two, but all things considered, I don't know how many more chances you're gonna get. You hear me?"_

_Castiel nods slow, a deliberate motion with no eye contact to it at all._

_Jo almost laughs outright when Dean makes his move. She doesn't, but boy, give the angel a few shots and for all his silence his face is an open book with seventy-two point font. Dean's not so bad, maybe in another time, or another place, but she's seen what happens when you get too close to these two, when you get sucked in too deep. _

_She shakes her head a little, hell, she's probably in too deep already. Maybe only an angel has the resilience for a relationship with a Winchester. A match made in heaven, right?_

_Several minutes later, Dean's breath hitches in his chest when Castiel uses the words 'last night on Earth.'_

_Eventually, they are the only ones left awake, and a gentle floorboard creak clues Dean in. _

_"Cas?" He whispers in the darkness. _

_"Yes, Dean?"_

_"I can't sleep."_

_"Would you like me to..." _

_"Uh. Actually." Dean swallows and reaches into the darkness. Cas moves his hand just a little, until it's in Dean's path, and Dean's fingers wrap around it. He looks around, but nothing stirs, no evidence that anyone can hear. He whispers, "Yes." _

He hadn't even felt the touch, the one he'd been expecting - Castiel's two fingers on his forehead to knock him out, to let him rest. It isn't dramatic, no melting room, no special effect, just a rush of color where there had been darkness.

A slate blue sky is streaked with wisps of clouds lit from an angle by the setting sun, rolling above him they are a hazy purple, and the farther he traces them, the brighter they get, until his eyes reach the horizon and find the orange fire burning there. He squints a little, his gaze confused - he can't seem to find the place where the sky ends, it just keeps going and going, as if he's standing on nothing but a pane of glass.

No, not glass - a mirror. The ground beneath his feet is flat and white and covered with just an inch or two of water, just enough to turn the pale earth into the biggest mirror imaginable, stretching as far as he can see in every direction.

Dean hardly has time to consider the question before he hears that comforting rustle and Cas is standing so close their shoulders nearly brush, answering the query that was never asked.

"Salar de Uyuni." His accent is maddeningly perfect when he names the place. "The largest salt flat in the world. I will disperse the clouds when the sun has set, if you like."

"Well I'll be damned. Who needs a travel agent when you've got an angel?"

"If you were willing to fly, the possibilities would be nearly endless." Is that a little sass Dean hears in Castiel's tone?

Dean chuckles. "Man, if we kill Lucifer and get outta this alive, maybe I'll take you up on that."

He glances down at the darkness of his own reflection and the strangeness of his feet and the feet of his mirror image meeting in the shallow water, of the little ripples that form around him with every step he takes. Looking up almost gives him vertigo, the way the sky and the earth merge into one all-encompassing oil painting, lit at once from everywhere and nowhere.

"It's almost hard to believe this is on Earth." Dean says. "You spend so much time on the road, you know, everything starts to look the same, you start to think you've seen everything."

"Consider this a reminder, Dean."

A line appears between Dean's brows. "Reminder?"

"Of what we endeavor to save."

The line deepens. "You think I need a reminder?" He pivots on his heels, sending soft ripples out into the darkening land. "I know what I'm saving, Cas."

When Dean's hands touch Castiel's shoulders, it's not that they fall, it is more that they are perfectly still, and the ground spins up to meet Castiel's back, shallow water soaking through his trenchcoat. This leaves Dean pinning Cas down, his knees dipping in the water as he straddles Cas' lower body.

"Dean, I didnt-"

"I know." His eyes don't leave Cas', as he confesses, "I did."

Air escapes Cas' mouth in a rush, and Dean watches as his pupils fly wide.

The clouds wheel overhead, speeding up until they break into tiny pieces and the blue of the sky deepens into a velvety near-black. The stars drip into existence against the backdrop one by one by one until they pepper the dream-sky like billions of little holes through the darkness giving hints of the light.

In the water, Cas lays upon the stars, and there is little difference between them - when Cas looks up at Dean's face, he knows all at once that the sky around its edges is the same as what Dean is seeing reflected in the water. It is dizzying, even to him. He lets his eyes fall shut.

He listens to Dean's breaths, fast and shallow, and then all at once on a sharp exhale, Dean is everywhere, palms skirting his sides and lips skating along his jaw.

"Dean. Dean, are you-"

"Shut up."

"I am concerned that- _nnnn._" Cas surrenders into a sound that fades into a rough, shuddering exhale as Dean's teeth play at the edges of his earlobe.

Dean's lips against his neck form the words, "Cas, please..."

Cas threads his fingers into the hair at the base of Deans neck and pulls him up until he can press their mouths together. _Very well, _he thinks hazily, his head spinning when Dean brings his hips down against Cas and both gasp.

The world starts to drip like a chalk drawing in the rain. Dean buries his nose in Cas' collar and tries to control his breathing.

"You won't wake up." Cas murmurs, "I've got you." With one hand, he holds Dean's head against his neck and lets out a little hiss when he feels Dean's tongue lap slow and lazy against the skin there . "I've got you." He says again, his other hand pulling on the small of Dean's back as he draws his knees closer and rolls his hips up.

Dean's feels Cas' erection through all the layers of fabric, brushing against his own, pressing, straining, wanting, and he moans a low vibration against Cas' skin. His arms feel weak, so he lowers himself further, putting more weight on Cas' body, more pressure, more contact, and his hips move against Cas almost on their own.

Cas' hands slide down the sides of Dean's jeans to touch the skin of his hips, to grasp for stability, for leverage that he doesn't so much want as _need. _And when he groans Dean's name into his ear, it's like fuel to the fire. Dean's rhythm speeds, desperate and starved.

"I need- need you-" Dean can't seem to get close enough, and then he grabs a fistful of Cas' too-big trousers and at once, they're just gone, because he wanted it that way. He comes in for a kiss and grins mischievously into Cas' mouth.

The unexpected heat and friction takes Cas by surprise and he _growls_ his lust, pushing Dean off him and down, changing their places, wet hair dripping saltwater on Dean's face and neck. He divests Dean in return and drags their barely-covered cocks together, turning Dean's throaty laugh into a deep keen of pleasure.

"Dean, I-" Cas whispers

"I, oh, I know, me too." Dean pants back. Heat coils deep his belly and he digs his fingers into the backs of Cas' thighs, constantly trying to get closer, more, and then he feels it:

The already-quick pace that Cas had set falls out of rhythm and into something more involuntary and strange, out of time with the rising mantra in his voice, "DeanDean_DeanDean-"_

It's enough to end him. Dean's hands grasp for anything as he comes against Cas' belly, fast breaths and a single, drawn out sigh of Cas' name. Somewhere in the dark explosion of his orgasm he feels a hand clap suddenly over his face, covering his eyes, and even through the fingers and his closed eyelids he still sees the flash of blue light accompanying Cas' inarticulate howl.

When the hand finally slips off his face, he opens his eyes. Cas' body, awkwardly clothed aside from his long-vanished pants, relaxes on Dean, his forehead resting on Dean's chest as they both catch their breath.

"Well. Who knew." Dean says softly, referring to what he assumes was some kind of grace-splosion.

Cas chuckles into Dean's ribs. "A fair number of humans, in the course of history, actually."

Dean waits for the hammer of anxiety and awkwardness to fall, barely breathing, but it doesn't come. He just looks up at the glittering night sky and wraps his arms around Cas' back, and instead of all the things he fears, he feels only peace.

He glances down his body at Cas, who shifts into a more sustainable position curled tight against Dean's side, their legs still tangled, their movements making tiny waves in the inch or so of water on the salt.

Dean starts to say, "If we survive this..."

"The odds seem poor." Cas interrupts. "It's nearly time."

He doesn't try to speak again. Instead, one of Dean's hands finds Cas', and he twines their fingers together, and like many times before, they simply wait together in a deep and comfortable silence.

_When Dean wakes, Cas is nowhere to be seen, and the sudden loss is almost tangible. He doesn't have much time to contemplate it, however, before it is time to pack up and leave and the warmth in his belly is replaced by nauseous ice. Were it not for a single glance heavy with meaning, he would almost think Cas had forgotten altogether. _

_Almost. _


End file.
